Transcendentalist Women’s Journeys into Attention
Evoking late-afternoon walks shared with Sarah Clarke on the shores of Lake Michigan, Margaret Fuller describes sunsets that embody time and place. Not only were they particular to 1843; they suggested landscapes far from the prairies and writings thousands of years old. Fuller writes, “Sunset, as seen from that place, presented most generally, low-lying, flaky clouds, of the softest serenity, ‘like,’ said S. [referring to Sarah Clarke], ‘the Buddhist tracts’” (SL, 22). Only a month earlier, the first translation of one of those “Buddhist tracts” had appeared in La Revue Indépendante. Half a year later Elizabeth Palmer Peabody would translate a section for the Dial.1 Their mutual friend Caroline Sturgis, who had accompanied Fuller and Clarke for the first part of their journey to the Great Lakes, placed an “Oriental Mythus” (her phrase) centrally within the philosophical understanding she was developing for herself and others.
Rereading Summer on the Lakes a few years ago, I found Clarke’s remarkable comparison. I had never seen it before. Or rather, no matter how many times I had read the passage, I never attended to it. This time I stopped, wondering how Clarke’s attention had been drawn to this aspect of Asia. What enabled her to see “the Buddhist tracts” in the sunset sky? Around the same time, I read Caroline Sturgis’s undated poem “How It All Lies before Me To-day” in manuscript at the Houghton Library and wondered what had drawn her attention to the Hindu traditions from which she cast her “Oriental Mythus.”2 The presence of goods from the China and India trade? A teacher, Elizabeth Peabody, who used a text featuring the history of India? Waldo Emerson and his reading? All of the above? How does one follow another’s attention? Especially when that attention may have left scant record?
The Latin roots of the word “attention” (ad tendere) tell us that when we attend to something we stretch toward it. I mull over the many ways these thinkers ask us to reach toward what is around us, whether in our minds, on the page, in a desert arroyo, or amid the chaos of injustices in which we daily live. Based less on argument and more on observation, drawing more from synthesis than analysis, attentiveness trades not in the definitive but in the evocative. And yet there is nothing as potentially ephemeral as attention. Where does it go? How is it shaped or structured into a form that does not destroy its very nature of momentary being?
For transcendental women educators and artists, few questions sparked greater attention. For the purposes of this chapter, I have selected a redoubtable trio: Margaret Fuller, Sarah Clarke, and Caroline Sturgis.3 Each was deeply interested and involved in the others’ work even before all came together for Fuller’s Conversations at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore. They had long attended to each other’s thoughts. The interwoven nature of their lives and their shared philosophic, educative, and aesthetic projects is full, fascinating, and well beyond the scope of this essay. I draw attention to only a few signal moments. First, Fuller and Clarke meeting when Fuller was ten and Clarke twelve, and Fuller noting even then Clarke’s excellence as a visual artist.4 Then there were early 1830s conversations around the dinner table at the boardinghouse kept by Clarke’s mother: taking part were Clarke and her brother James, as well as boarders Elizabeth and Mary Peabody, historian Jared Sparks, and educator Horace Mann, with Margaret Fuller and Waldo and Charles Emerson joining the company from time to time. Finally, there were reading parties and historical conferences developed and taught by Peabody that included Clarke and Sturgis as participants and attracted Fuller’s collegial interest. For both Clarke and Sturgis, these events may well have been the source for their later aesthetic and philosophic approaches as well as an early fostering of their interest in Asian texts.5
Sharing a fascination with how attention could be given form, these three women developed a range of possibilities, some specifically focused on and for women (Fuller’s Conversations as well as Peabody’s reading parties and historical conferences). As Peabody vowed, as Fuller concurred, and as Phyllis Cole has pointed out elsewhere in this volume, there would be “no silent ladies” in their gatherings. Attendance meant response. Other genres of attention engaged audiences through different modes, language translation among them.6 Then, there were other kinds of translation: experience into language and experience into drawing. Through the verbal and visual sketches in Summer on the Lakes, Clarke and Fuller instruct the reader-viewer on how to replace prejudice with open-mindedness by keeping the eye moving. Similarly, Sturgis envisions a philosophical tradition centered on the motion of thought through matter.
For all the transcendentalists, attentiveness was multidimensioned, often involving literal attendance at a lecture, conversation, or concert. It encompassed the patient rendering of minute detail and the equally patient rendering of expansive abstraction. It kept trust with a temporality that was both timely and salient, and asked of the individual a wide and wild flexibility of observation. Part and parcel of that flexibility was an insistence on expansive reading of the philosophical and aesthetic traditions from every time and place. Little wonder that Emerson featured a series of what he called “Ethnical Scriptures” in the Dial.7 Seeking to “collate” the wisdom literature of “different ages and races,” he was in keeping with the approach pioneered by historian Hannah Adams in the late eighteenth century in her Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects and developed more radically by Elizabeth Peabody through both her historical conferences and her collection of books and periodicals for the Foreign Circulating Library.8 Adams, setting forth the guiding principles of her work in 1784, emphasized the importance of impartial presentation. When quoting sources, she would not include sections where authors passed judgment on their material.9 Peabody, however, found that Adams did not live up to her own guidelines. Citing Adams’s commonly used work on U.S. history, A Summary History of New England (1799), she noted that it “might have been entitled, ‘The Providence of God in New England’” (LEPP, 17).10 Peabody would champion an increasingly “no-strings-attached” breadth—a true eclecticism that probed a subject of inquiry without relying on prior judgment.
That was a keystone of transcendental attentiveness. For such attention to yield new thought, immediate judgment had to take a back seat. Provisionality was essential. In Caroline Sturgis’s words, what the individual sought to say was “how it all lies before me to-day.” To perceive what was in the moment—to attend to that, and not to one’s prior convictions or others’ interpretations—asked for a rigor as keen as the sharpest analysis. Could you describe what you saw and resist the temptation on the instant to represent it as something else you had already seen or to promptly coin an interpretation? Public and published forms pushed for such conclusiveness: the sermon with its moral teachings, the essay with its reasoned discourse. Although possibly spurred by attentiveness, such forms did not express attentiveness itself. That remained for the more provisional and dialogic forms: the conversation, the letter, the journal, the sketch, the privately circulated poem.11
Just at the time when I could direct a period of attentiveness toward these women of transcendentalism, another experience began to shape my understanding. Health taught me to understand attention differently. Anyone who experiences the occasional migraine knows what I’m saying. Those with intractable migraine comprehend the lay of the land even more closely. How often we must think about Fuller. When pain splits your brain, it is no surprise that attention takes on dimensions it never before assumed. And in the aftermath when the pain subsides and the nausea settles, and sound no longer jabs and light no longer jars, there are the hours of a mind rendered different. It muses. Unable to rush, unable to zero in and go for the analytic edge, it is luxuriantly inclusive. Not quite the transparent eyeball, but worth imagining in that way.
In the new rhythm of days accompanied by migraine, the old forms of attention are dismayed. The singular focus on which, as scholars, we often pride ourselves no longer works. Or it works in one clear direction: the shortest path between oneself and another migraine is uninterrupted concentration. And so one looks again. Sees differently. Values what is accessible in the moment. Looks to observation. Brings together small pieces separated by the absence of an argument. Calls attention to the sentence or paragraph or verse that has not yet developed our attention. What other forms might attention take beside the well-known undivided version that it is now impossible to sustain? The time within thought opens. Intermezzi arise from interruptions. Insight opens into different forms of relation, ones that rest on the closely observed detail and that embrace provisionality as part and parcel of all we can say. Before attention dims, if we are lucky, we can each say, with Caroline Sturgis, “how it all lies before me to-day.” No more. No less.
Returning to Fuller’s Lake Michigan sunsets, I follow the movement of attention in her description. From sunset she moves with temporal familiarity into the night sky. She pictures the sudden burst of a shooting star that could not “astonish” the presiding serenity. She concludes the section with what many would have seen as an extravagant comparison: “Yes! it was a peculiar beauty of those sunsets and moonlights on the levels of Chicago which Chamouny or the Trosachs could not make me forget” (SL, 22).
I pause here, in part, for the palpable future in Fuller’s sentence. In what time does she stand? Her imagined, impersonal reader might well see the comparison as based in life experience. “Could not make me forget”: it sounds as though she has made that comparison in person, observed sunsets in both places, and found that the one in no way overshadowed the other. But that choice of “could” over “would” opens a double possibility, as her friends well knew. Here were both the lost trip to Europe and the longed-for one come true. The future implied by “could not” suggests a reality that will become indisputable.
What of the comparison itself? To this day, there are those among us (perhaps you, perhaps me) who can’t help a private guffaw. The shores of Lake Michigan and the Alpine peaks? Who is she fooling? Never having been present at one of those sunsets in either of those places, I leave the question to others’ (highly subjective) experience. It does make me itch, though, for a guidebook from Fuller’s day (or ours) in order to hear the patent descriptions of sunsets in tourist spots. It also returns me to the whole of Fuller’s passage that explores the dangers in initial response. As with her difficulty “seeing” Niagara Falls, perception itself has already been overinfluenced. At Niagara, she never quite gets the book images out of her line of sight. Prior experience holds her attention captive, even though the experience is two-dimensional. She has already read so many words on Niagara and seen so many sketches of the famous falls that the physical place remains in their shadows. In the prairies, a similar “a priori” frames her experience, but only her initial experience. At first she takes in only “the very desolation of dullness.” In that frighteningly circular way we all know, she only knows how to see how she knows how to see. Her prior landscape determines what she sees—whether that view has been crafted from daily walking or daily reading. Had those internalized points of reference remained her standard, she would have continued to see an impoverished waste of “vast monotony” (SL, 22). Her published description, however, proceeds differently from her own experience. She does not let the reader see monotony first. Preceding any comments on “dullness” is a vivid description of flowers that leaves the reader in a dazzle of color and light. Only once she has given us so much detail does she turn 180 degrees to her first response.
The writer’s and the reader’s experiences are kept purposely separate. Most of Fuller’s audience would have been reading through their own East Coast lenses that would have framed the view in monotony, but she does not privilege the familiar. Neither does she omit it. Monotony remains part of the experience, and a focus-changing experience at that. She presents both, modeling for her readers how we attend to the shifting rhythms between the familiar and the unknown. On the lakeshore she walks “with slow and unexpecting step,” not walks but “traces.” As if learning a new pattern, she follows the thin boundary again and again. This is a pattern with seemingly no end: “There was a grandeur in the feeling that I might continue that walk, if I had any seven-leagued mode of conveyance to save fatigue, for hundreds of miles without an obstacle and without a change” (SL, 22).
Clarke created no etching of this moment for Summer on the Lakes. The representation of sunset or flowers may well have seemed futile in a black-and-white form. She would instead render the prairies in a manner complementary to Fuller’s descriptions. Considering one of Clarke’s two prairie etchings (Rolling Prairie of Illinois), you find a similar emphasis on movement. To preclude the response of “dullness,” Clarke shapes the etched lines so that the eye is offered motion wherever it looks. The grass hillocks are composed of fine curvilinear strokes. The nearby stalks of grass spread up and away. Birds are skimming in foreground and distance. Even the clouds participate, though this is difficult to perceive in our modern reproductions.12 The contour lines of the sketch allow the viewer to wander through the prairie, up one ridge or down another, up to the rise and under the trees. Here is a visual equivalent of Fuller’s physical manner of attentiveness: “to trace with slow and unexpecting step.”
Both Clarke and Fuller replace monotony with possibility: the “unexpecting step” that might continue indefinitely. As Fuller remarks, “there was a grandeur in the feeling.” No longer an “encircling vastness” like some Miltonic Chaos, the place is now the center for a “lovely, still reception … nothing but plain earth and water bathed in light.”13 Breaking free from preconception occurs only through the steady process of learning a place on its own terms. She comments: “It is always thus with the new form of life; we must learn to look at it by its own standard. At first, no doubt my accustomed eye kept saying, if the mind did not, What! no distant mountains? what, no valleys? But after a while I would ascend the roof of the house where we lived, and pass many hours, needing no sight but the moon reigning in the heavens, or starlight falling upon the lake” (SL, 22). Demonstrating for her reader how dangerous the eye can be, she illustrates the insidious way it convinces the mind that everything can be seen in only one way. Now of course, this is not any eye, but the accustomed version.
Taking the custom out of our own eye may be no easy task of extraction. How often, after all, do we “change our minds” in any real sense of that phrase? And yet, whether you’re Fuller describing the prairies or Thoreau inviting us to know beans, it’s a direct path, if a time-engrossing one. Their attention to the most particular detail is key. Only when the eye rests long enough on unfamiliar elements around it can it begin to see anew. And as with both Thoreau and Fuller, movement is integral. One cannot stand still. Their “rest” is filled with movement—walking, hoeing. It is a place for the “-ing,” a world of continuous present but no hard conclusions. There is nothing mysterious in the process. It means opening attention in a new direction, stretching toward what one does not yet know.
By the summer of 1843 Clarke knew a great deal about such attentiveness. Observer and participant, she attended in multiple capacities to the varieties of thought and expression in and around Boston. Her mother ran the boarding-house in which Horace Mann and Elizabeth and Mary Peabody took rooms. The conversations around that boardinghouse table were lively and engaged. Sarah gave drawing lessons at Alcott’s Temple School. She was one of the adult students in Peabody’s historical conferences.14 When her brother James took a ministerial position in Kentucky, she served as his best source of information, a witty and canny observer of the “Newness” back home. In addition to being a skillful copyist and engraver, she was encouraged to undertake a career in original painting by none other than the then-premier American painter Washington Allston. Writing to James, she records the conversation from this vocation-making day. She had brought two paintings for Allston to see. Of the second, she reports, he said: “‘Ah! Why, this I like better than the other. The same unity of tone, and this shows a feeling for nature. Miss Clarke,’ (turning round), ‘on such an occasion as this I should not hold myself justified in saying anything less or more than the truth exactly. I should do very wrong to say more than the truth, but I don’t hesitate to advise you to make landscape painting your profession. You will be successful in it, and you will find it a profitable profession.’”15
It may well have been Clarke’s success as a painter that prevented later generations from placing her firmly within the transcendentalist circle.16 Barbara Novak’s monumental study of nineteenth-century American landscape painting established the common cultural milieu in which visual and verbal artists worked, and yet, as Albert von Frank points out in his chapter on visual arts in the Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, it has been difficult to get beyond “assertions of affinity” (OxH, 441). Scholar Gayle Smith’s work opened many doors into the role of painting within transcendentalism, but few of us have figured out how to walk through them. Nancy Stula’s At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892), based on an exhibit at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut, and featuring essays by David Robinson and Novak, is the only sustained study to date of a visual artist within the transcendentalist circle.17
To this day in our criticism, we face difficulties interpreting the transcendentalists’ relationships to various forms of art. In our focus on Emerson and Thoreau, with their interesting distrust of human creativity (fine in creating, worrisome as creation), we have seen through their eyes and by their standards. The art piece is always problematic. In addition, both men endorsed the primacy of nature over art. What Fuller or John Sullivan Dwight wrote about music as the highest form of expression, what Sturgis explored in terms of form itself, or what Clarke and Cranch embodied on canvas in the way of philosophy have been seen as less transcendental than romantic, more European-derivative than part of the “Newness” in which each thinker variously participated.
There is also the matter of which “transcendentalisms” have received critical attention. In her landmark discussion of Caroline Sturgis’s and Margaret Fuller’s shared commitment to art, Kathleen Lawrence reminds us that we have only begun to explore the “interdisciplinary and female driven aspects” of what she so aptly terms “aesthetic transcendentalism.”18 Continuing this work are Ivonne García’s chapter on Sophia Peabody and Sterling Delano’s consideration of Marianne Dwight in this volume.
In Clarke’s case the matter is complicated by the absence of her work. A list of her paintings in her brother’s papers at the Houghton Library tantalizingly names sixty-six canvases along with some of their owners, but of those I can account for only two: a landscape acquired by the Boston Athenaeum and the painting she gave to Emerson in 1843.19 Of this painting, Emerson wrote to Fuller in May, just before she and Clarke left on their western journey: “I beg you to congratulate Sarah Clarke on my behalf on the rich summer that opens before her, & tell her that I am very often her debtor indoors & on rainy days for the sunlight & foliage which she has brought from the forest & fixed by good enchantments on the canvass of this valued picture. I have often intended to write & thank her; Meantime you must convey this message” (LE, 3:176).
Another element in Sarah Clarke’s work—in this case her written observations—also suggests why she has been sidelined. The satiro-comedic element in transcendentalist expression deserves more attention than we have given it, whether that means revisiting caricatures of Cranch’s or the dry wit of Sarah Clarke describing Emerson’s lectures and Bronson Alcott’s conversations as “intellectual coteries” that she would willingly forfeit in favor of Fuller’s Conversations (“LS,” 27 October 1839). There is much more to say about how those within the Newness sought to keep it honest, unpretentious—and “new.”
While Clarke did not hesitate to deflate the aggrandizement surrounding habituated attendance at an Emerson or Alcott event, she had not always been so willing to forgo Emerson’s lectures. In earlier seasons, not only did she unfailingly attend them but they superseded her own work. Writing to James on New Year’s Eve / New Year’s Day 1837–38, she notes how her intended painting has gone by the wayside. At the same time, she is not worried over the consequences. She trusts what has presently captured her attention: “I had intended by this time to have painted some of my Western views in oils.”20 “But these lectures,” she continues, “take up half my time and all my thoughts; but I shall not lose by it. Is it not the characteristic of a true work of art that it takes you captive for the time, and carries you out of yourself, that it may restore you to yourself raised and improved?” (“LS,” 31 December 1837–1 January 1838).
Characterizing Emerson’s lectures as “a true work of art” (she would elsewhere liken them to a gallery of paintings), Clarke found herself engrossed with matters of the American Scholar. She writes, “I am at present pervaded and dissolved by one idea,—that is, Emerson of man thinking.” If ever we as twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers have wondered how women of the nineteenth century responded to that phrase, here at least is one woman directly applying those words to herself. It was by no means easy. Her letters record the varied difficulties she faced on her way to becoming a self-reliant painter. At the center was what she called “the central difficulty of self-culture” (“LS,” 11 February 1838). Listening to Emerson’s lectures, she found no direct answer though she noted possible aids to reflection along the way. Reporting on the lecture that we know as “The Head” but that she designates “‘The Power of Thought’—on the function of the soul and the discipline it requires,” she comments on two essential “rules”: “The first is to sit alone. Consider it a necessary of life to have an apartment where you can be alone every day, even if to do so you must sell your coat and wear a blanket. … The other rule is to keep a journal.” She allows that this second recommendation is nothing new, “recommended by every teacher to every learner, and yet,” she adds, “it comes with new force from him.” Her own experience with journal keeping had never yielded much fruit: “I so detested a record of the feelings and that part of self which passes away.” Apparently, the new force she heard in Emerson’s words was his focus on what she called a “journal of the intellect.” Here one could record the permanent—the working of intellect that outlasts the transient elements of self. She concludes her report on the lecture with a passage that seems designed to stand as one of those passages for such a journal: “The most interesting inquiry to us is, how we can come into possession of our inheritance, which is truth. I answer, by sincerity. If we express honestly and fully that which is within us, we shall then start from a new point. The universal law of God seems to be, Use all the truth you have, and you shall have more” (“LS,” 31 December 1837–1 January 1838).
What Clarke repeats from the lecture is no mere transfer of words from one lecturer to another. This discussion of “inheritance” is timely. Not only does this lecture date from the 1830s period of burst economic bubbles and bank collapses, but it also reminds us of the shaky legal ground upon which a woman’s monetary inheritance stood. What she remembered as Emerson’s words on inheritance spoke directly to her situation. In a family with five sons and one daughter, there was little doubt where an inheritance would have landed, had there been one. Her only guaranteed inheritance was an abstraction. Unlike other kinds of abstractions, however, this one was accompanied by a “how-to” manual. Perhaps it would not seem practical to us. It certainly would not seem practical to most of my business-minded students, but for Clarke it succinctly expressed her situation. Expression was key. Not limited to language, it required individual directness. She needed to call forth outer form from inner substance.
For Clarke, not only was this calling forth artistically difficult for anyone, but it raised every question about what authorized a person, particularly a woman, even to attempt such work. What were the consequences? Could one accept and then act on them and also earn money through them? As she wrote in late August 1838, shortly after hearing Emerson’s July address at the Divinity School: “As for trusting in my own genius, I do not think I am deficient in that point.” She assures James that she feels no self-doubt along those lines. She then responds to his encouragement with words that both encourage and dead-end. She quotes him back to himself, reaffirming her “right” to “fairly try the experiment and see what [she] can do.” However, she brings him up short against his assumptions. He assumed she could readily divide her time and manage well as a part-time artist, shrinking the expectations of women’s duties just a little, but not too far. Relying on her own self-knowledge, she sees this as an impossibility: “The question with me is, Have I a right to give myself up, time and thoughts, body and soul, to this interest, to leave nothing of myself for any social purpose, to sever all the ties that bind me to my kindred and my race? You will say that so much is unnecessary: that I need not be so one-sided as that; that I can consecrate a part of myself to art, and leave the rest to satisfy the calls of duty. But, if I know myself, it is not so.” While her brother claims she need not think of her work with such fixed focus, she assures him that it can be done in no other way. Hers is not a situation where attention can be divided, especially when she needs to contribute to the maintenance of the household. And yet she finds a way through the discord of societal and individual response by a consonance of thought that harmonizes the two. Such resonance strikes action from words. She writes: “But latterly, here is Mr. Allston advising me to make it my profession, and promising me success. Here is Mr. Emerson saying, ‘It is your first and highest duty to obey your instincts: satisfy the wants of your own soul, and you will do right’” (“LS,” 20 August 1838).21
From there Clarke began working closely with Allston. Not surprisingly, Emerson opposed the decision, urging her to work out each artistic difficulty on her own: “Mr. Emerson asked me a question such as I might have expected from him: he asked me, ‘How can Mr. Allston help you?’ ‘But how can he help you?’ Clearly he disbelieves in any help but self-help. For my part, I have arrived at that time of life, as mother’s phrase is, when I do not disdain to receive help from an Allston. To be sure, it is far grander to get out of your difficulties alone and have all the glory of it; but meantime one might starve in the forest, before one could find the way out. ‘Art is long, Life is short’; and now I have found the true application of that saying. It is because life is so short that one cannot do everything for one’s self” (“LS,” 20 August 1838).22 Facing her own questions of vocation, woman thinking, self-knowledge, and practicality, she sets aside worries of overinfluence. Time is a factor, and she has none to spare.
Here is a practical self-reliance that does not blush at collaboration. That her decision in no way compromises her work appears in a letter to James a year later. As she points out, experimentation may be intriguing, but it can also be fruitless:
I have never yet told you anything about my Allstonian experiences. I hope one day to show you some fruits of that season, for I feel now as if I could paint the universe, having got hold of a most philosophical and clear method of going to work. I have hitherto wasted so much time in trying experiments that I am fully prepared to appreciate the value of a worthy plan. I might have wasted years in study and not have discovered what Mr. Allston has shown me in a few days. He has painted an entire landscape before my eyes and answered every question I chose to ask him with the utmost frankness. I was glad to hear him say that he never painted a picture that did not cost him his whole mind, for it justified my original impression that there is a whole world of thought belonging to each picture. In particular he said that the Eliot landscape cost him a world of study, far more than he meant it should when he began it. (“LS,” 18 September 1839)
Clarke’s self-knowledge and experience are amplified by Allston’s comments that every painting “cost him his whole mind.” She recasts this in terms of her understanding: behind every painting is a “whole world of thought.” She now feels ready to “paint the universe” with a method both clear and philosophical. Rather than leaning on Allston’s experience, she has transformed it. It came into her life: it goes out from her truth.23 For her, moments of attention—whether spent on the shores of Lake Michigan or in the woods of Kentucky—were expressed through a “philosophical and clear method” that yielded landscapes of the “whole mind.”
That, of course, is a matter of opinion. A matter for speculation. Can we see it in her paintings? Who did? There is precious little known response to Clarke’s work.24 We have her theory. What about her practice? I sit here wondering: What would enable us to see her art on her own terms, even if we had ready access to works now known only by a list among her brother’s papers? Her own terms set high stakes for visual art: what is drawn from the mind, what is realized in visible forms. Formal matters were elemental in her work as a painter. The landscape on canvas conveyed a “world of thought.” Using a method that was at once technically grounded and philosophically based, she translated the universe.
Clarke’s interest in form also appears in her written philosophical inquiries. In a letter to good friend Mary Peabody (not yet Mann), she responds to Mary’s discomfort at the verbal picture Emerson had painted in one of his lectures. In a passage most familiar to us from “Experience,” known to them from the lecture “The Heart” in the Human Culture series of 1837–38, Emerson described the individual’s inviolable solitude in a way that apparently bothered Mary. She wrote to her friend Sarah, asking if she too experienced such dis-ease at the picture he painted of two people meeting only at points. Sarah’s reply was a frank “no.” Such descriptions did not bother her in the least because the feeling was absolutely familiar. She comments to Mary: “‘Did I feel faint?’ you ask—No, Mary—when he spoke of the loneliness of the soul I felt that what he said was so true—almost so trite that it scarcely made an impression on me, and I did not remember it till you reminded me of it—This I have always felt—A perfect intercourse is a thing so far from my experience that I scarcely believe in it—It is ever true that ‘we meet only at points’—and when the points do touch an electric spark of communication is felt which is a novel & delightful sensation enough—and that I suppose we call friendship & love—Is it not so?—But what do they amount to after all in comparison with the years of lonely converse with ourselves.”25 Emerson’s words seemed “almost so trite” that she made no note of them for herself. It was not until Mary reminded her that the passage came to mind. Allowing that there might be such moments of “perfect intercourse,” she unflinchingly acknowledges the daily reality of the singular, solitary self. She pictures the self alone in conversation with itself alone.26
Clarke’s words to Mary suggest no interest in rendering thought as biography. She explores human existence from her own perception, but without suggesting that her observations can be neatly explained away by particular events. After she describes the years of self-conversation, she introduces other metaphors for an absolute solitude that nonetheless incorporate an underlying shared essence. She gives Mary the image of the ocean: each person a drop of water, each person separated from the other drops. Contained. Formed. The essence remains the same yet separated by boundaries that cannot be crossed. She writes, “I have often felt a thrill of wonder at the thought that my soul is forever separated & boxed up—and made into an individual—and this feeling is so strong & constant that it comes near to a remembrance of the time when we were really a part of the whole—drops in the ocean of life—‘now spilled, and which cannot be gathered.’” To be individual—indivisible—in Clarke’s understanding means a distinct yet double experience of form. It is a thought that is also a feeling. The thought of the soul—what it is to be individuated—and the memory of the feeling when one was not.
If for Sarah Clarke the matter of form was in the certainty of separation, for Caroline Sturgis constant flux guaranteed that nothing remained bounded for long. Those who have read Sturgis’s poetry and prose know her philosopher’s bent and her longstanding interest in the relation between genius and form. As Lawrence discusses, Sturgis was not only a visual artist herself but someone interested in assembling works of art that spoke to each other. Rather than just assuming the “society” life and “collecting” mania attributed to her, we must look instead at what she chose to do in her writing, her painting, and her collecting. While Lawrence looks to the visual arts, I turn to Sturgis’s writing, and in this particular case a long, unpublished, philosophical poem she titled “How It All Lies before Me To-day.”27
Her titling phrase speaks volumes. It suggests a landscape: how it lies before her. One can think about a possible Miltonic reference: “the world was all before them.” Or a landscape as might have been painted by Sarah Clarke, “sunlight & foliage which she has brought from the forest & fixed by good enchantments on the canvass.” It also suggests there will be no hasty conclusions, to borrow Thoreau’s phrase. She writes comprehensively yet provisionally. The poem itself is evocatively structured. It is written in terza rima, Dante’s form. This is no poetic muscle flexing, but a choice that aptly matches form with thought. Sturgis’s stanzas again and again take up the constant metamorphosis of thought into expression, back into thought, and then into further expression. For example, from the beginning of the poem:
The primal Thought within itself must move
Divide itself, to know itself in Love
Receive itself, that Truth may Truth approve,
Of Segment life begin the endless chain,
Matter, evolving laws to form, attain
And thought is symbolized to think again.
The form is liquid yet contained. The tercets with their self-continued rhyme (aaa, bbb, and so on) and constant iambic create an undulating rhythm. Something is realized, then rethought, realized, then rethought, then realized. Without thought rendered into form, Sturgis implies, thought would end. Matter literally creates new thought rather than simply reiterating the old in new forms. Here she parts company with those philosophies that would view form and matter as secondary. She makes it essential to creation: “Matter, evolving laws to form, attain / And thought is symbolized to think again.”
In the poem, Sturgis takes up questions of original creation as well as matters of unity. Just what is the relationship, or perhaps more aptly, what are the relationships among the one and the many? She challenges established assumptions about the derivative and secondary nature of manifestation. In her thinking, there is no such hierarchy. She celebrates a complexity that allows for multiple iterations occurring simultaneously. The process of thought realized is never ending and overlapping. She writes,
A song within a song mars not the sense
Note behind note makes music more intense;
Let this for complex schemes be the defence.
As the last line suggests, she is well aware that some would fault her perspective for its complexity. There is no Occam’s razor in her world. She, however, feels no need to apologize. The image she chooses and carries further into this later section of the poem focuses on music, evoking the music of the heavenly spheres as well as the art form that such transcendentalists as Margaret Fuller and John Sullivan Dwight deemed the highest form of expression. A few stanzas later she links the individual to “natural desire,” which in turn predicts a Dickinsonian going out upon circumference:
And all my life is natural desire
A kindred stirring of the primal fire
Which drives me under, deeper, farther, higher.
And as the thoughts in me a centre crave,
The centre a circumference would have,
Each wish be planted in a fruitful grave.
Even so those stars in spheral music bound
A home within the universe have found,
And satellites to perfect the endless round.
Worth noting is the underlying restlessness that drives this perpetual process. The speaker’s desire is not so much fire stolen from the gods as it is an innate dynamism. While Sarah Clarke envisions the solitary drops of water separated from each other, Sturgis imagines fire as the elemental force. Its apt rhyme with “desire” suggests a kinship that yields both energy and light. Desire, in Sturgis’s representation, need not be smothered. Distinguished by its activity, it speaks for her definition of the self: a force moving below surfaces as equally as it moves above them.28
Consider the final tercets in Caroline Sturgis’s poem:
And all that was not taught in the first home
That thou art child of the creative power,
Is in thy turn to be creative power
The constant flux of constant energy
Now refluent not only through but from thee
Will make it perfect happiness to be.
The individual is creator, a lesson not learned in “the first home,” a phrase that may well refer to the instabilities in Sturgis’s own home.29 It may also take us to Wordsworth, but it upends the Wordsworthian reference. The child who fathered the man had not understood his creative prospects. In these lines, lives move in a different manner—through transmigration, for example. Now were it not for other references in the poem, I would be cautious about bringing in such a possibility. But the following lines illustrate the multiple worlds upon which Sturgis drew:
*Upon itself the Only One did brood
The One Alone discerned its solitude
And cast a Lotus Flower upon the flood;
The flower bloomed, a good within the Good,
The One Alone forgot its solitude,
The life-beat made a circle on the flood.
And thought on thought began the endless dance,
And Love on Love, broke up the primal trance,
And day made night, and Certainty made chance.
Ancient of Days, and in the moment new,
The Eternal Spirit in an endless view,
Doth self-enfolded arms in self developed forms pursue.
*The First of all, says the Oriental Mythus,
Brooded on itself like a sea of milk. Presently the need
Of creating was felt and a Lotus flower was cast forth,
the first existence amid the Essence.30
I turn first to the footnoted explanation. Written as a quatrain, these lines name her source. Of course, it is a name comprising a great abstraction. Her “Oriental Mythus” cites no text, no verse. She combines her sources here and throughout this poem. It is a tour de force of “wisdom traditions,” her own “Ethnical Scriptures” beginning with a Neoplatonic world, creating a blend of ideas, taken mostly from the Vedic tradition (what she calls “the Oriental Mythus”), evoking Christianity, though never by name and strikingly without a Christ, and making certain there is a prominent place for the Greek Muses. Hers is a way of inclusiveness. Remarkable within the poem (though not remarkable for Sturgis) is the absence of hierarchy. She does not prefer one tradition over another; she presents each as another manifestation of fundamental reality:
All cantos of the poem but repeat
The words which at the first our questions greet
To love and to be loved; to think and to be thought
In her poem, there is no system of “progress” or “advance.” All the world’s traditions stand, equally valued.31
Through Sturgis’s poem, I reach a conclusion, and yet her poem foregrounds no such conclusion. Its title holds true to the end. Provisionality is its element. To borrow Clarke’s words, the poem represents a “world of thought,” but it never presumes to be definitive. The composition may well have cost the writer her “whole mind” of that moment. Each work of formed expression invariably did, but did not exhaust the mind itself. Whether Fuller tracing the shore of Lake Michigan to learn bodily what she had only experienced negatively, or Clarke coming to every landscape with a mind newly re-formed, or Sturgis celebrating “the constant flux of constant energy,” each thinker cultivated an attentiveness that did not destroy what it expressed. With minds always in motion, they opened worlds of perception to which we are still learning to attend.
In the spirit of Mary Moody Emerson: “Good conversation makes the soul.” While our twenty-first-century days do not allow the weekly possibility of conversational gatherings or the art of thought-full letter writing practiced by Emerson and the many women she knew and influenced, the correspondence I have shared with Phyllis Cole, Jana Argersinger, and Elizabeth Addison keeps that vital thread of transcendental attentiveness thriving. I am grateful for their insight, their interest, and, in the case of this essay, their always thought-provoking, thought-extending suggestions. They truly put the “vision” back into “revision.” Phyllis kindly let me read an earlier draft of her essay on Peabody published elsewhere in this volume, and the conversations that preceded and followed were my Sarah Clarke equivalent to heralding a new year. To Alan Hodder, I am also grateful for his comments, which clarified what this essay both could and could not do. Finally, though never final, I am incalculably indebted to the women scholars who have made my own work possible. There are too many “Exaltadas” to name, though I will single out Helen Deese, Phyllis Cole, Elizabeth Addison, Susan Belasco, Nancy Simmons, Leslie Wilson, and Megan Marshall.
1. Eugène Burnouf, “Fragments des Prédications de Buddha,” La Revue Indépendante, 25 April 1843, 520–34; “The Preaching of Buddha,” Dial 4, no. 3 (1844): 391–401.
2. Caroline Sturgis, “How It All Lies before Me To-day,” poem, in Correspondence and Manuscripts, Caroline Sturgis Tappan papers, bMS Am 1221 (314), MH-H; not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.
3. In an earlier version of this paper, the trio was a quartet that included Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, whose careful work developing the holdings of the Foreign Circulating Library at her West Street Bookstore made possible much of the transcendentalists’ attentiveness to varied philosophical traditions. Her own role as translator of the section of The Lotus Sutra that appeared in the Dial in 1844 (the first appearance in English of any of the Buddhist sutras) has yet to be fully explored. Also for future study is the topic of women reading the debates surrounding Buddhism in the nineteenth century.
4. Fuller writes: “I saw a head of her [Rebecca Clarke’s] daughters painting which looked very natural Five or six pencils and brushes lay upon a window sill—and a portrait was upon a wooden frame. I saw also a beautiful landscape[.] This young ladys name is Sarah[.] She has a singular taste for painting” (LMF, 1:96).
5. One of the texts Peabody used with pupils in her history studies was A. H. L. Heeren’s Historical Researches in the Politics, Intercourse, and Trade of the Principal Nations of Antiquity (Oxford: D. A. Talboys, 1832–33). Megan Marshall notes Peabody’s reference to this work in Peabody’s 1882 “My Experience as a Teacher” (Peabody Sisters, 532).
6. Peabody and Fuller were signal among transcendental translators, Peabody primarily for her translation of Joseph Marie de Gérando’s Self-Education; or, The Means and Art of Moral Progress (Boston: Carter & Hendee, 1830), a book that would strongly influence the transcendentalists. In this arena, Fuller is best known for her work on Goethe and his circle. Other women in the transcendental translation circle would include Eliza Cabot Follen with her work on Fenelon.
7. Robert Richardson calls the “Ethnical Scriptures” the “boldest new feature” introduced into the Dial under Emerson’s editorship (Emerson: The Mind on Fire [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995], 379). With selections from The Laws of Menu, Confucius, and The Lotus Sutra (translated by Peabody), the series ran from July 1842 to the final issue in 1844. The phrase itself lived on and was used, for example, by second-generation transcendentalist Moncure Conway in the title of his collection The Sacred Anthology: A Book of Ethnical Scriptures (New York: Henry Holt, 1874).
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dial 3, no. 1 (1842): 82. Adams’s book went through several editions. Published first in 1784 under the title An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects which Have Appeared from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day, it was issued in an expanded second edition in 1791 under the title A View of Religion, in Two Parts. Two more American editions as well as three British editions appeared in the author’s lifetime. For the complex history of these editions, see Gary D. Schmidt, A Passionate Usefulness: The Life and Literary Labors of Hannah Adams (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2004).
9. Adams notes: “The reader will be pleased to observe, that the following rules have been carefully adhered to through the whole of this performance. 1. To avoid giving the least preference of one denomination above another: omitting those passages in the authors cited, where they pass their judgment on the sentiments, of which they give an account” (A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, Jewish, Heathen, Mahometan and Christian, Ancient and Modern [New York: James Eastburn; Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1817, Advertisement], n.p.).
10. Marshall also notes the unsatisfactory personal meeting between the sixty-five-year-old Adams and the fifteen-year-old Peabody (97).
11. I am grateful to Phyllis Cole for conversations on these issues of attentiveness and provisional form.
12. I have consulted the etchings Fuller sent to Emerson when they were deciding which should be included (MH-H Ms Am 1280.235 [244], Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association deposit), as well as Abba May Alcott’s 1844 copy of Summer (MH-H AC85 Al 191 Zz844o). In both, the skies with their various clouds are beautifully present as are other details: rain, variations in light on prairie grass, detailing on canoes, and expression on faces.
13. Worth highlighting is Fuller’s use of the word “reception.” One of those quintessentially transcendentalist concepts, it appears at exclamatory and declarative moments in Emerson’s essays. See, for example: “A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth” (“The Over-Soul,” in CW, 2:166). Also worth much more consideration is how some of the transcendentalists (for example, Emerson) gendered this concept feminine, and how others (Fuller, both Ellen and Caroline Sturgis) used but also resisted such gendering.
14. Peabody spoke highly of Sarah Clarke as a friend. Writing to her sister Mary in the year 1833, Peabody noted that the friendship with Clarke was one of the few things of great value in an otherwise “most unsatisfactory year,” and six weeks later she mentioned the “divine letters” Clarke had written to her (LEPP, 121, 124).
15. Sarah Clarke to James Freeman Clarke, 11 June 1838, “Letters of a Sister,” MH-H bMS Am 1569.3 (12), not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission; hereafter cited parenthetically as “LS.” Clarke’s letters were prepared for publication under the title “Letters of a Sister (1831–1840)” by her niece Lillian F. Clarke and published in the Unitarian periodical The Cheerful Letter between 1903 and 1910. The periodical was the written arm of the Unitarian women’s group “The Cheerful Letter Exchange.” Formed in 1891, the group sought to extend education to women who had little access by sending books, as well as letters, along with its monthly newsletter. Clarke’s letters thus appeared at the turn of the twentieth century for women struggling to expand their own education. The copy I have consulted is in the Houghton, and rather than the periodical itself, it is solely the printed letters pasted onto the pages of a large scrapbook-like volume. Robert Hudspeth identifies these as the corrected proof-sheets for the original printing (LMF, 1:203). The whereabouts of Clarke’s original letters are unknown.
16. In his biographical entries for Dial contributors, George Willis Cooke observes that Clarke was “one of the first women to take up art as a profession” (An Historical and Biographical Introduction to Accompany “The Dial” [1902; New York: Russell and Russell, 1961], 2:68). Cooke mentions her as a colleague to artists Harriet Hosmer and Margaret Foley in Italy. Clarke also receives a very brief entry in J. L. Collins’s Women Artists in America: Eighteenth Century to the Present (Chattanooga: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1973), n.p., which reports that she was “known for her landscape paintings.” As yet, few scholars have attended to Sarah Clarke. While she often comes up in biographical discussions of Fuller and Peabody and also figures in Emerson biographies, she has remained on the margins, though it seems her friends did not see her in that way. Beyond Joel Myerson’s “‘A True and High Minded Person’: Transcendentalist Sarah Clarke” (Southwest Review 59 [Spring 1974]: 163–74), the only other work specifically focused on Clarke is Joan Alice Kopp’s brief but helpful biography written for the centennial of the Clarke Library in Marietta, Georgia (founded by Sarah Clarke). See Sarah Freeman Clarke: Woman of the Nineteenth Century (Marietta: Cobb Landmarks and Historical Society, 1993). See also Myerson’s “Sarah Clarke’s Reminiscences of the Peabodys and Hawthorne,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal (1973): 130–33.
17. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980); Gayle L. Smith, “Emerson and the Luminist Painters: A Study of Their Styles,” American Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1985): 193–215; Nancy Stula, At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892) (New London, Conn.: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 2007).
18. Kathleen Ann Lawrence, “Soul Sisters and the Sister Arts: Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, and Their Private World of Love and Art,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 57 (2011): 79–104.
19. Kentucky Beech Forest (ca. 1839)—most likely one of the “Western views in oils” that Emerson’s lectures had kept Clarke from working on—now hangs in David Dearinger’s office at the Boston Athenaeum. I am grateful to Dr. Dearinger, Susan Morse Hilles Curator of Paintings and Sculpture and Director of Exhibitions; to Hina Hirayama, Associate Curator of Paintings and Sculpture; and to Catharina Slautterback, Curator of Prints and Photographs for their generous help with the Clarke materials.
20. Not to be confused with the sketches Clarke made during a later trip with Fuller, these would have dated from her visit to James in the winter of 1836–37 during his ministry in Kentucky.
21. Myerson reads this passage differently, markedly contrasting Emerson’s and Allston’s comments. In the context of Clarke’s ongoing discussions with her brother, I see Clarke reconciling the dissonance. Together, Emerson’s and Allston’s words licensed the all-consuming nature of her art: with painting as her profession she satisfied her soul, depended on no one, and in fact benefited others.
22. Allston’s work created a debate among transcendentalists over how to value it, where to place it, and whether to claim it as part of their element. See C. P. Seabrook Wilkinson, “Emerson and the ‘Eminent Painter,’” New England Quarterly 71, no. 1 (1998): 120–26; as well as von Frank’s focus on the 1839 Allston exhibition (“The Visual Arts,” in OxH, 441–52). As he points out, Allston’s work seems “to have emboldened the feminist work of two generations of Transcendentalist women” (448).
23. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in CW, 1:55.
24. In addition to the comment from Allston that Sarah Clarke reported to James in her 1838 letter, the most detailed remark comes from Emerson, expressing thanks for the painting Clarke gave him shortly before leaving with Fuller on the journey that would issue in Summer on the Lakes.
25. Sarah Clarke to Mary Peabody, MH-H bMS Am 1569.8 (147); not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.
26. At the end of “Illusions,” Emerson writes, “And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,—they alone with him alone” (CW, 6:174).
27. The poem has never been published, nor do we know how frequently it may have circulated among friends.
28. Worth further study is the restlessness evoked by women in the transcendentalist group. While accounted for in part by their interest in motion and its essential importance to thought, there is also a tonal difference that I have found particularly striking in the poetry of both Caroline and Ellen Sturgis.
29. The Sturgis home was a complicated one. In 1826, the highly favored son William died in a freak boating accident, and Sturgis’s mother never recovered, eventually moving out of the Boston home altogether. Sister Ellen was sharply criticized during this period for not showing appropriate grief. Father William was by all accounts an aloof parent whose real interest was exploration: not only playing a seminal role in the China trade, he was deeply interested in the American continent and the contest with Russia for the fur trade in the Northwest.
30. The lotus holds deep significance for both Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Here, Sturgis clearly draws on Hinduism.
31. In her day, Sturgis shared this position with very few. Of Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau, Alan Hodder observes: “In contrast to the Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker, who viewed Eastern religions in a more critical light, or even Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, whose assessment was somewhat guarded, the three Concordians welcomed the religious and literary contributions of India and the Far East with undiluted favor” (OxH, 34). Peabody’s assessment is indeed interesting. While clearly maintaining the superiority of an ideal Christianity (LEPP, 303–5), she was nonetheless instrumental in guaranteeing that others would be able to come to their own conclusions by reading the texts for themselves.