Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 119principles of the spiritual life were incarnated in the flux and processes of nature and
the constantly changing life of the individual. To live according to those laws was to
live in the present, with respect for others but without timidity or apology, in the
knowledge that the final judge of any person resided in the self.
Those who pursued the Transcendentalist creed included Theodore Parker
(1810–1860), who managed to remain a Unitarian minister while active in the
Transcendental Club, and Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), who tried to establish a
cooperative community based on Transcendentalist principles at “Fruitlands,” at
Harvard – it failed after only seven months. Emerson did not approve of this
cooperative venture. Nor did he like another, more famous communal enterprise
that lasted rather longer, from 1841 to 1847. This was Brook Farm, the cooperative
community set up under George Ripley (1802–1880) nine miles outside Boston.
Among those interested in the venture were Nathaniel Hawthorne, who actually
lived there and wrote about it in The Blithedale Romance (1852), Orestes Brownson
(1803–1876), Elizabeth Peabody (1804–1894), Alcott and Parker, and the person
who, apart from Thoreau and Emerson himself, is now the most famous and
remembered member of the Transcendental Club, Margaret Fuller (1810–1850).
Fuller was educated by her father, who subjected her to a rigorous regime: by the age
of 8, she was reading Ovid. When her family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in
the early 1830s, she met most of those central to the Transcendentalist movement.
Forced to support herself when her father died, she took up teaching for a while in
Rhode Island. But in 1838 she returned to the Boston area, began working as a
translator, edited The Dial for two years, and from 1839 to 1844 ran a series of
conversational classes at the home of Elizabeth Peabody. The classes were originally
for women. Believing that women had previously been educated for domesticity and
adornment, Fuller designed “Conversations” to guide and draw the class members
out, to make them think for and realize the potential within themselves. They were
so successful, however, that Fuller was eventually obliged to admit men. And between
classes, in 1843, Fuller found time to tour the Midwest. The result of the trip was her
first book, Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1844), which she described as a “poetic
impression of the country at large.” What is notable about the book is the sympathy
its author shows for the plight of the vanished Indians and, even more, the white
women of the region. “They may blacken Indian life as they will,” Fuller writes of her
visit to the former site of an ancient Indian village, “talk of its dirt, its brutality, I will
ever believe that the men who chose that dwelling-place were able to feel emotions
of noble happiness as they returned to it, and so were the women who received
them.” As for the white women, “the wives of the poorer settlers,” Fuller observes
that they, “having more hard work to do than before, very frequently become
slatterns.” The wealthier women, in turn, suffer from a mistaken attempt to imitate
and inculcate Eastern standards. They struggle to pursue domestic routines and
standards of general refinement utterly inappropriate to their surroundings. And at
the first opportunity, they send their daughters to school in some Eastern city, from
which the young women return utterly unequipped to deal with “the wants of the
place and time.”GGray_c02.indd 119ray_c 02 .indd 119 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM