George Sand and Margaret Fuller: “Expansive Fellowship”
Gary Williams, University of Idaho

“[A]ll the aspiring and discontented women known to me in America,--poets, orators, reformers,--were the offspring of George Sand, endeavouring to build in the New World a palace for Women . . .”

--Moncure Daniel Conway[1]

Julia Ward Howe, who learned French at the same time that she learned English, remembered a tutor from her youth who “did not forget to impress upon us her conviction that to be French was to be virtuous, but to be Parisian was to be perfect.” The Paris of the 1830s, for the wealthy of America, was “civil, civic, free, witty . . . the Mecca of students in all sciences.”  A visit there was “the ne plus ultra of what parents could do to forward a son’s studies, or perfect a daughter’s accomplishments.”[2]

            Simultaneously, according to a writer for Blackwood’s in 1833, the France of Louis Philippe epitomized “the consequence of unmooring the human mind from the secure haven of faith and virtue.”   Beneath a decorous veneer “is half concealed a mass of licentiousness probably unprecedented in any modern state. . . . [N]ever since the days of the Roman Emperors, was pleasure so unceasingly pursued by both sexes, as it is now in Paris.”  Blackwood’s put the blame for fanning this fire squarely on French novelists, whose books focused almost exclusively on “adultery, or other guilty and extravagant sensual passion,” the general result being “ruinous to every species of regular or virtuous conduct.”  Worst of the lot, by most accounts, was George Sand, “a monster, a Byronic woman,” whose 1833 work Lélia, for example, was called a “mire of blood and dirt, over which, by a strange perversity of feeling, the talent of the writer, and that writer a woman! has contrived to throw a lurid, fearful, and unhallowed light.”  With only occasional and sotto voce dissent, these were the sentiments most Americans absorbed from the British and American press in the 1830s regarding Sand. [3]

            Yet, as Catherine Masson noted in 2003, most American intellectuals—“malgré des réticences” (172)—considered Sand a great, even a very great writer.  The full account of these “réticences” remains to be told, although segments of the story exist piecemeal in studies of individual writers—Carolyn Karcher’s biography of Lydia Maria Child, for example, and Helen R. Deese’s edition of the diaries of Caroline Healey Dall.[4]  Samuel Ward, Julia Ward Howe’s brother, was a great fan and became the medium for his sister’s appreciation; he also tried repeatedly to interest his friend Henry Longfellow, apparently thinking that if the poet could just catch a little of Sand’s fire, his own works would benefit.[5]  In February1842, when Longfellow asked for Ward’s help in meeting Sand, Ward responded excitedly, reveling in her hermaphroditic qualities as her chief virtue:

As for George Sand nothing will be easier than for you to know him should your travels lead you her way.  I will furnish you with a warm letter to Janin who will have great pleasure in making you known to him and I candidly think her worth seeking.  Besides his genius for writing she has an impulse toward perfectibilitification and is intimate with that fiery apostle Lamennais who sympathises in his efforts to elevate the people and recognises in her a Kindred Spirit.  Should it be your fortune to fall in with him do not fall in love with her.  He will enchant you more in an evenings interview, if the fit of Psychic inspiration be upon her, than any being you ever knew & is a kind of moral Hermaphrodite.[6]

The significance of this spirited (if private) expression of delight is clarified by hearing it in the context of the first full-length American essay on Sand’s work, which had appeared eight months earlier in The North American Review.  Its author, Francis Bowen, was one of the Unitarian conservatives who had railed in the 1830s against Transcendentalism’s embrace of subjective experience; like Longfellow, he was a Harvard instructor.  In this essay, Sand’s imagination is “morbid,” her spirit “gloomy,” her mind and heart “thoroughly diseased”; she is an instance of “a noble nature . . . gone astray.”  Her androgynous persona is invoked specifically to invite the reader’s repugnance: it is a “desire to ape the manly character,” the function of her having “chos[en] to set at defiance the laws of morality and the opinions of the world.”[7] 

* * * * *

            One would like to know how Bowen’s characterization of Sand struck Margaret Fuller, who from a twenty-first century vantage point, in certain ways, and despite her reservations about Sand’s “outlaw” qualities, might legitimately be regarded as the American George Sand.  Emerson reported in the Memoirs that Fuller “had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of herself, 'A man's ambition with a woman's heart, is an evil lot'”—not precisely Sand’s own sentiment about her conditions during the early 1830s, but certainly descriptive of the way she was perceived in England and the United States.   Further, Emerson noted, Fuller “found something of true portraiture” in Balzac’s character Séraphîta, a Swedenborgian androgynous figure from his 1834 novel of that name, who offers instruction on how to move beyond materiality to a sexually-undifferentiated plane of spiritual existence.[8] 

            If Emerson did see Fuller as hermaphroditic and thus Sand-like, his intuition would have arisen, first, from reading Fuller’s 1839 notes on la jeune France, which Emerson excerpted for the Memoirs, but which have never been reproduced in full in print.   These notes—Charles Capper calls them her “first extensive writings on recent contemporary literature” (260)—are indispensable to an understanding of Fuller’s response to George Sand, and I generally endorse Capper’s sense of the movement of Fuller’s mind over the Sand works that she read that summer.   He underlines Fuller’s particular interest in Spiridion and Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre and rightly focuses on “one extraordinarily important idea” Fuller gleaned from this reading—“that it was possible to write in a literary genre that combined the emotional, private, and ‘feminine’ with the intellectual, public, and ‘masculine’” (262). He quotes at length the passage in which this idea emerges, which I here also set forth, since my argument in this essay is built on the details of this reaction:

These books have made me for the first time think I might write into such shapes what I know of human nature.  I have always thought that I would not, that I would keep all that behind the curtain, that I would not write, like a woman, of love and hope and disappointment, but like a man of the world of intellect and action.  But now I am tempted, and if I can but do well my present work and show that I can write like a man, and if but the wild gnomes will keep from me with their shackles of care for bread in all its shapes of factitious life, I think I will try whether I have the hand to paint, as well as the eye to see.  For I cannot but feel that I have seen from the mouth of my damp cave, stars as fair, almost as many, as this person from the Flèche of the Cathedral [Hélène in Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre] where she has ascended at such peril.  But I dare boast no more, only please fate be just and send me an angel out of this golden cloud that comes after the pelting showers I have borne so long. (262)

Capper observes that Fuller did indeed try to “paint” in a Sandian mode, in “a few tales,” unspecified, written a few years after this time, but emphasizes her eventual choice of the genre of “intellect and action” over the “ethereal” one of Romantic fiction as the appropriate and salutary route for her.  I would not quarrel with this implication, but the degree to which Fuller intentionally worked in Sand’s genre—the deliberateness and seriousness of her effort to emulate Sand’s mode—has yet to be fully appreciated.[9] 

*****

When Fuller first visited the Emersons in 1836, she was, according to her host, already well read in French literature: “she knew Molière, and Rousseau, and any quantity of French letters, memoirs, and novels” (Memoirs I.204).  She had also a far-reaching stock of information about French socialism, “especially as it concerned woman” (Memoirs I.218).   But although Sand’s frequent appearances in the Revue des Deux Mondes during the 1830s surely must have caught Fuller’s attention, her significant encounter with Sand began in the spring or summer of 1839.  Her early reactions are recorded in letters to Emerson, in a journal she kept while visiting the DeWolfes in Bristol, R.I., and in the reading notes on la jeune France, parts of which Emerson included in the Memoirs.

Why at this moment did she turn her attention to Sand?  She had been much occupied with Goethe, Novalis, and German thought generally, and aside from George Ripley’s publication of  Cousin, Constant, and Jouffroy in his Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature series, there was little impetus in Fuller’s immediate circle to regard French writers and thinkers as contributing significantly to the development of Transcendental ideas.  The impact of Charles Fourier was yet to be felt.  Although no specific reference in Fuller’s writings supports this claim, I want to posit that she was prompted to read Sand systematically by two articles appearing in British periodicals in April and July of 1839.[10] 

The first, by Henry F. Chorley, addresses five works published by Sand between 1835 and 1839 and thus begins to chronicle a quite different writer from the one who had become infamous after John Wilson Croker’s savage attack in the April 1836 Quarterly Review three years earlier.  Among the works Chorley discusses are two that Fuller found deeply absorbing (Lettres d’un Voyageur and Spiridion) and a third that she also urged on Emerson, though without the same avidity (Mauprat).  Chorley‘s attitude toward Sand can’t be characterized as balanced or objective, but he does make it clear that he intends somewhat to modify the cartoonish image promulgated by the British press.  He invokes a widely-reproduced drawing of Sand by Luigi Calamatta, depicting her “half-sibylline, half-animal countenance,” in order to suggest that readers need to look beyond this mask: “To any one who derives from the study of contemporary imaginative literature some aids to his knowledge of the progress of belief and intelligence, a certain acquaintance with the works of Madame Dudevant is almost essential” (361).  Chorley’s theme is Sand’s movement

from advocating the sensualism of the body to that of the mind—from the passionate extravagances of Lelia and Jacques to the mystical rhapsodies of Spiridion—from pleading for a social revolution in which law and opinion should offer no civil barrier to man’s wildest appetites, to preaching the doctrine of a universal church in which there shall be as many divinities as man’s most grasping imagination may covet.  (362-63)

Many particulars in Chorley’s commentary on the excerpts he includes would presumably have piqued Fuller’s interest--especially, perhaps, his highlighting of similarities between Lettres d’un Voyageur and Bettina Brentano von Arnim’s Goethes Breifwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835), for which Emerson and Fuller shared an enthusiasm.  He names Spiridion “the most remarkable of her works” (385), noting however that for an English reader to appreciate the work, he “should throw himself loose of his insular tastes and habits of judgement as regards works of fiction” and concluding that in spite of its “general falsity and corruption,” it contains “some episodical gleams of what is true and lofty, some breathings of imperfect faith uttered in the most elevated language of poetry” (386, 390).

            The second article appeared in the Monthly Chronicle in July, its author a person later to play a major role in Fuller’s life: Giuseppe Mazzini.  In exile in London since 1837 as a result of his revolutionary activism in Italy, he had learned English and was supporting himself by writing for various periodicals.  This essay is—as Mazzini himself points out—the first published in England to demand a “fresh and more considerate examination” of Sand’s work; it is an explicit response to both Chorley and Croker.  Whereas Chorley’s approach had been to invite attention to Sand on the grounds that her more recent works abjure sensuality and the depiction of immoral behavior, Mazzini urged a reconsideration of the earlier works, the very ones Chorley dismissed as a “catalogue of monstrosities,” by suggesting that the morality of a literary performance consists not in the topics presented, but in “the final effect” produced by the book.  “Whether virtue be unsuccessful or triumphant, whether evil finds its penalty or remains unpunished, in the work, matters little, if we are taught to revere and love virtue notwithstanding its misfortunes . . .” (29).  Mazzini’s defense of Sand is rational and rhetorically sophisticated.  It rests on a sense of shared political sympathies and is indirectly an expression of his own—republican sentiments to which Fuller would also have resonated.  It also finds evidence of discrimination on the basis of gender, both in the vitriol critics had spewed regarding her life circumstances and in the differential treatment her characters and plots had received in comparisons with those of Sue, Janin, Balzac, and Goethe.  Most notably, it is suffused with a spirit of great sympathy and admiration for Sand’s achievement—and, it would seem, for her plurally-gendered persona, as in this climactic paragraph:

Such is George Sand, his life, his labours.  She [italics in original] has suffered—she revolted,--she has struggled—she has sought, hoped, found; and she has told us all.  The long series of her compositions form a grand confession.  Spirits young, pure, and innocent, not worn by unhappiness, whom contact with the world has not yet endowed with the knowledge of evil, may well—perhaps, should—abstain from reading it; but let the rest, numerous as they are, boldly go through the whole; they cannot, we say it with profound conviction, but rise the better.  (27)

Mazzini’s comments on specific works focus on Indiana, Jacques, and Lélia.  Spiridion, which he also regards as one of her most significant novels, gets only a footnote due to space limitation.  He translates most of Letter Eight of Lettres d’un Voyageur, choosing this passage probably because of its no-holds-barred assault on Talleyrand, but in addition because this book “full of poetry, and without which it is impossible to appreciate Madame Dupin, is the one we love most” (36).  Although Fuller later reacted quite oppositely to Lettres, this passage would have aroused none of the particular antipathy she later recorded and does exhibit certain features of Sand’s style that Fuller employed in her own writing.

            Whether these essays were influential in increasing Fuller’s interest in Sand is unprovable.  What is known is that she had read her first Sand work, Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre—published in April and May 1839 in Revue des Deux Mondes (and thus not mentioned by either Chorley or Mazzini)—as well as Spiridion, twice, by July 31 when she traveled to Bristol, R.I., for a ten-day stay with the DeWolfe family.[11]  The months preceding this departure were a period of high intellectual and emotional intensity: Fuller’s first book-length publication, a translation of Johann Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe, appeared in May; she quarreled with Caroline Sturgis; she had begun to conceive the idea of her Conversations (which would begin that fall); and she was beginning to sense that her hopes regarding Samuel Gray Ward, a man she had regarded as a potential suitor, would be disappointed.[12]  This moment in which matters of head and heart concentrated, it could be argued, was a fertile field into which the seed of George Sand dropped.

* * * * *

            Incipient fertility is, in fact, the dominant motif in the opening lines of Fuller’s Bristol journal:

I have never been so near the fountain of inspiration, yet I have not attained to drink.  The divinity flits before me, a glittering phantom on the mead, her eyes divine look up to me from the depths of still waters, yet I can never lay hold on her robe or dive to the door of her grotto. . . . It seems as if I drew nearer to my aim, and as if much was accumulating which a moment might cast into a state of crystallization.  Cellini may cease to be a goldsmith yet and become a sculptor[.]  If not here then yonder—The strong desire I feel must be a prophecy only I must not antedate its fulfillment.  One who feels like me must either be or write a poem. (454-55)

Immediately following is a note about Spiridion, which she had finished re-reading earlier in the day:

Never was a nobler conception of the lot of the Seeker.  The Maker is not so easily portrayed, yet this writer could do it—Many chords vibrated in my bosom, especially where the monk resigned himself at last to the influences of external Nature and was almost reclaimed.  This work is less divine than La Lyre, but manly and masterful. (455)[13]

The “Seeker” in Spiridion to whom Fuller refers is presumably Father Alexis, an elderly monk sequestered from his associates to keep them from the pollution of his alleged impiety.  It could equally well be Angel, the initial narrator of the work and its nominal protagonist, a novice who runs afoul of the hypocritical hierarchy in the Franciscan monastery and finds common ground with Alexis through shared visions of the monastery’s founder, Spiridion.  Or it could also be Spiridion himself, a 17^th-century spiritual maverick born into a Jewish family who migrated first to a liberal Protestant Christian perspective, then was converted to Catholicism (during which period he used family money to create the monastery), then returned to a Protestantism that prioritized individual conscience, then rejected traditional religious structures altogether and spent his last days writing a secret credo, which was buried with him.  The novel is a series of embedded narratives contained by Angel’s efforts to articulate his own beliefs.  It has trappings of the Gothic novel, but like an earlier Sand work, Lélia, it is what Sand described as a “non-visible novel”—not intended to “amuse and entertain readers with an idle imagination . . . appeal[ing] little to the eye [but] constantly to the soul.”   The texture of the work is that of a philosophical dialogue.  Although its finale is Angel and Alexis’s opening of Spiridion’s tomb to retrieve the manuscript credo, followed immediately after its reading by the destruction of the monastery and the murder of Alexis by soldiers of the revolution—a sound basis for a melodramatic climax if there ever was one—both the revealed credo and the scene of plunder are anticlimactic, and the novel ends abruptly (“And he died.  Then a radiant form appeared beside him, and I fainted”[320]).[14]

            Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre, Sand’s response to Goethe’s Faust, is a philosophical drama that additionally reflects Sand’s involvement with Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt.  As the work’s 20^th-century translator/editor notes, Sand attempted a difficult task: “to cast into words the effect of music and to give dramatic interest to philosophical abstractions” (2).  The complicated plot is structured around the relationship between Albertus, a philosophy teacher, and his ward Hélène, who is the inheritor of a magic lyre.  Albertus is besieged by Mephistopheles, who can win Albertus’s soul only by destroying the lyre and capturing the spirit that lives in it.  Albertus has tried to teach philosophy to Hélène, but her sensibility is an unfertile field for rational thought: she responds to nature and music, and eventually evokes the love of the Spirit of the Lyre.  This love allows the Spirit to escape Mephistopheles’s designs and thereby saves Albertus, too, from his sterile rationalism.

            The play unfolds mainly through Albertus’s Faustian monologues or through conversations among Albertus, his students, and Mephistopheles.  Hélène is seldom present and gradually pays attention only to the Spirit of the Lyre.  When Hélène first makes the lyre sing, Sand’s stage directions indicate that the Spirit’s words “are not heard by men, and only the melody of the lyre, of which the words are the expression, strikes their ears” (87).  Sand’s efforts to render the Spirit’s meaning produced rapturous, mystical “speeches” such as the following, probably what Fuller had in mind in describing the work as “divine”:

Listen carefully, daughter of the lyre.  Learn the secrets of the planets.  From the depth of the horizon, across the black verdure, there comes a feeble voice, but one of unbelievable purity, that mounts gently in the sonorous air. . . . Harken to what the moon sings to you and reply to her when she has penetrated and filled you with her voice and light.  Become silently intoxicated with her melancholy plaint; drink long drafts of her moist reflection! (121-22)

Eventually, Hélène, too—or rather, the “Spirit of Hélène”—speaks in this way.  Hers and the Lyre’s discourse is not the anti-sensual, non-visual language Sand intended in Lélia and Spiridion, but rather a lush, poetic mode intended to make the natural world palpable.  The Lyre invokes the beauty of reality:

Come with me, my sister, come!  My wings will enfold you and carry you to the peaks of the mountains. . . . We shall steep our silvery robes in the tops of clouds over a lake, and we shall run along all the sandy beaches, without leaving there the imprint of our feet.  We shall hang from the branches of willows, and I shall seed your blond tresses with blue insects, living sapphires that drop in tears on the boughs. (128)

Yet in the work’s climactic scene, Hélène ascends to the spire of the cathedral and, in dialogue with the Lyre, rejects its vision of the world’s beauty: what she sees of “the empire of man” is not a glorious spectacle of human ingenuity and power, but rather a devastating view of “immeasurable depths of despair . . . the howlings of grief without resource and without end” (146).  She scorns the Lyre’s suggestion that “Providence” will lead humans to knowledge of truth and a just world: “Providence is mute, deaf, impotent for these victims.  It is clever and active in serving the designs of the perverse” (150).  Ultimately, Hélène and the Lyre are reunited, the Lyre persuading Hélène to “let not ambition for an ideal future make you neglect the only instant when the ideal is present to you” (175).  Her death, freeing the Spirit of the Lyre, propels them both toward the heavens, and Albertus receives the lyre’s “harmony” into his soul.

            Fuller’s impressionistic commentary on these works, incorporating a number of comparisons with other texts, first records a disappointment that Spiridion did not contain the same “lyric effusion” that she had valued in Les Sept Cordes and that had seemed increasingly beautiful as she had reflected on it.  She noted, however, that the religious sentiment in both was the same, and on a second reading of Spiridion she was as enthusiastic about the “different mould.”  The question of how to incorporate religious and philosophical speculation within a narrative frame absorbs Fuller:

A piece of character-painting does not seem to be the place for a statement of these high and wide subjects.  For here the philosophy is not merely implied in the poetry and religion, but assumes to show a face of its own.  And, as none should meddle with these matters who are not in earnest, so, such will prefer to find the thought of a teacher or fellow-disciple expressed as directly and as bare of ornament as possible.  (Memoirs I.245)

Capper reads this passage as expressing Fuller’s sense that the novel was “dilettantish” and suggests that her admiration in general was aroused rather by the works’ “unabashed intellectuality” than by their aesthetics (261).  It is true that later in the passage Fuller expresses astonishment at Sand’s “insight into the life of thought” and, further, a conviction that she must have known “it” through a man, specifically a philosopher.  She seems to find the whole idea of George Sand improbable, so entirely do these books exhibit a sensibility that Fuller has no experience of in a woman (save perhaps herself).   Yet Fuller’s praise is for both the thought and the art of both works.  She goes on to distinguish Spiridion from Wilhelm de Wette’s 1822 novel Theodor, finding the latter such a failure that she couldn’t finish the book.  Spiridion, in contrast—although she professes uncertainty about its “scope and bearing”—has piqued her interest in the French Catholic republican humanist Félicité Robert de Lamennais (whose spiritual quest is reflected in Father Alexis’s), and she asks Emerson to send her Lamennais’ Les Paroles d’un Croyant (1834).  Here is Fuller’s reflection on the evidence that “the Dudevant has loved a philosopher”:

I am more curious than ever.  I had supposed the view taken by these persons in France, to be the same with that of Novalis and the German Catholics, in which I have been deeply interested.  But from this book, it would seem to approach the faith of some of my friends here, which has been styled Psychotheism.  And the gap in the theoretical fabric is the same as with them.  I read with unutterable interest the despair of Alexis in his Eclectic course, his return to the teachings of external nature, his new birth, and consequent appreciation of poetry and music.  But the question of Free Will,--how to reconcile its workings with necessity and compensation,--how to reconcile the life of the heart with that of the intellect,--how to listen to the whispering breeze of Spirit, while breasting, as a man should, the surges of the world,--these enigmas Sand and her friends seem to have solved no better than M.F. and her friends.  The practical optimism is much the same as ours, except that there is more hope for the masses—soon.  (Memoirs I.246)

Obviously, Sand’s skill in integrating such questions into an imaginative work drew Fuller to contemplation of the issues themselves.  But Fuller’s interest goes beyond a pondering of the “enigmas,” and in fact even in her reflections on Alexis’s spiritual course—as when she wonders how to reconcile heart and intellect or how to “listen to the whispering breeze of Spirit while breasting . . . the surges of the world”—she seems to be thinking aesthetically.  She goes on to address directly the novel’s literary qualities:

This work is written with great vigor, scarce any faltering on the wing.  The horrors are disgusting, as are those of every writer except Dante.  Every genius should content itself in dipping the pencil in cloud and mist.  The apparitions of Spiridion are managed with great beauty.  As in Hélène, as in Novalis, I recognized, with delight, the eye that gazed, the ear that listened, till the specters came, as they do to the highlander on his rocky couch, to the German peasant on his mountain.  How different from the vulgar eye which looks, but never sees!  Here the beautiful apparition advances from the solar ray, or returns to the fountain of light and truth, as it should, when eagle eyes are gazing.  (Memoirs I.246-47)

I return to several of the particulars of these notes, but I want here to reproduce comments on Les Sept Cordes from the second set of Fuller’s notes, dated “1839.”  Here again, Fuller’s perceptions focus on the successful fusion of thought and art.  As Chorley had done in the British and Foreign Review essay and as Emerson was repeatedly to do in his exchanges with Fuller about Sand, Fuller juxtaposes Sand’s work with Bettina von Arnim’s highly stylized correspondence with Goethe:

When I first knew George Sand, I thought I found tried the experiment I wanted. I did not value Bettine so much; she had not pride enough for me; only now when I am sure of myself, would I pour out my soul at the feet of another. In the assured soul it is kingly prodigality; in one which cannot forbear, it is mere babyhood. I love abandon only when natures are capable of the extreme reverse. I knew Bettine would end in nothing, when I read her book. I knew she could not outlive her love. 

But in Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre, which I read first, I saw the knowledge of the passions, and of social institutions, with the celestial choice which rose above them. I loved Hélène, who could so well hear the terrene voices, yet keep her eye fixed on the stars. That would be my wish, also, to know all, then choose; I ever revered her, for I was not sure that I could have resisted the call of the Now, could have left the spirit, and gone to God. And, at a more ambitious age, I could not have refused the philosopher. But I hoped from her steadfastness, and I thought I heard the last tones of a purified life:--Gretchen, in the golden cloud, raised above all past delusions, worthy to redeem and upbear the wise man, who stumbled into the pit of error while searching for truth.  (Memoirs I.248)

Fuller’s mode here is less analytical, more personal.  Both works have inspired an identification with the female protagonist; Fuller does not distinguish between the fictional Hélène and the real Bettina in their impact on her—surely a testament to Sand’s success in embodying Hélène.  I do not read the phrase, “the experiment I wanted,” as referring to a literary experiment, but rather to a way of being, specifically a model for how to pursue, as a woman, a “purified life.”  The character of Hélène manifests what Fuller sees as Sand’s own experiential achievement: “the knowledge of the passions, and of social institutions, with the celestial choice which rose above them.”  Yet the means through which Fuller grasps the person George Sand is a literary work, and although the notes go on to chronicle Fuller’s disappointment in the personal George Sand when she read Lettres d’un Voyageur, the novels themselves remain powerful in her imagination.

André and Jacques, earlier works which Fuller read after those just discussed, also evoked her admiration (qualified by her distaste for their claims on behalf of “passion”):

Still, in André, and in Jacques, I traced the same high morality of one who had tried the liberty of circumstance only to learn to appreciate the liberty of law, to know that license is the foe of freedom.  And, though the sophistry of passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dank and dirty ground.  I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and began a new existence beneath the sun of a true Ideal. (Memoirs I.248-49)

Jacques, in particular, captured her interest, the title character and his female soulmate Sylvia representing for her an “ideal—the soul that, capable of the most delicate and strongest emotions, can yet look upon the world as it is with a free and eagle gaze, and, without any vain optimism or weak hope of a peculiar lot, can . . . accept life.”[15]  The behavior that elicits this praise, presumably, is Jacques’ recognition that his wife Fernand is more strongly drawn to another man than to him and his decision to free her by killing himself.  Sylvia, though she is the wife of Octave (the man whom Jacques’ wife loves), also embraces the realities of these affinities.  “That is the true stoicism,” Fuller reflects, “not to be insensible but superior to pain.  How noble to rush to battle like the Spartan youth without a buckler.”  Thought of this nobility leads Fuller again to the question of “painting”—whether it “is impossible to paint the heroic woman.”  Consideration of other fictional women—the Countess St. Leon from William Godwin’s St. Leon, Constantia in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, unspecified characters in Byron and Scott—puts Sand’s Sylvia in a class of her own: “these are more superficial, and you feel rather how they affected the observers than what they were.  Sylvia speaks more directly to us than any of them.”  Ultimately in Fuller’s estimation, Sylvia’s state of mind is more palpably realized than Jacques’:

Such persons [as Jacques] should be given with “large, sharp strokes.”  He could not have described himself, and the attempt to lay bare the springs of his being is vain.  The expectation he excited is so great that he cannot fulfill it. . . . I say like Sylvia how could you live for the heart alone; and his answer is not satisfactory.  He ought to have respected himself too much to die that persons like Fernand and Octave might be happy.  Shall Prometheus refuse chains and torture because the flies and fishes are happier than he.  It is natural enough that he should feel this world not worth his stay, much less fit for his abode, but so strong a mind should have felt that much earlier and as strongly as it ever could feel it.  The truth is he could not find any way to live nobly at last and so he dies. 

This train of thought takes her somewhat away from the book: Jacques’ attitude reminds her of Byron, of Bulwer, of the irritating conceit that intellectual men, men of experience, cannot be properly loved by “soft and exigeantes [demanding]” women.  “My experience of women is very different,” she observes: “women of any imagination wish to make ideals of the men they love and it is not possible for their heroes to have too many advantages over them.”  The role Sand performs in Fuller’s developing perspective on how women can and should live (despite Fuller’s reservations arising from the close-up view provided by Lettres d’un Voyageur) is clear from such passages—clearer, certainly, than what emerges from her brief remarks in Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

            The most significant note in these reflections, however, is the passage that closes them, what Capper designates “one extraordinarily important idea” (reproduced in full earlier): “These books have made me for the first time think I might write into such shapes what I know of human nature.”  The writing Fuller imagined would cross a gender divide: she would write “like a man[,] of the world of intellect and action,” and not “like a woman, of love and hope and disappointment.”   But this writing would also integrate the perspective of both genders.  I believe Fuller’s language here is both extremely precise and susceptible to misreading.  She does not seem to bar inclusion of the characteristic female themes of love, hope, and disappointment—she seems willing to pull aside the “curtain” behind which she had vowed to keep such emotions—but in taking up these topics she will do it in the way a man would address them, as she sees George Sand to have brilliantly done.  “[I]f I can but do well my present work and show that I can write like a man . . .”: such an effort will determine whether she has “the hand to paint, as well as the eye to see.”  Fuller will in fact trump Sand’s achievement, since the “insight into the life of thought” that she praised in Sand will come not “from a man,” as she suspected it had in Sand’s case, but from Fuller alone.  It is specifically Hélène’s vision in Act IV scene 1 of Les Sept Cordes that inspires this sense of possibility: “I cannot but feel that I have seen from the mouth of my damp cave, stars as fair, almost as many, as this person from the Flèche of the Cathedral where she has ascended at such peril.”

* * * * *

            These notes on la jeune France initiated Fuller’s exchange with Emerson about Sand, but Emerson at this moment had become infatuated with a different young European female writer: Bettina von Arnim.  At first dubious, he wrote to Fuller on July 9, “[Bettina] is a wonderful genius & yet these creatures all wing & without any reserve make genius cheap & offend our cold Saxon constitution.”  This initial reserve quickly ignited; by the end of the month, just before Fuller left for Bristol (and in the same letter in which he requested her notes on French writers), Emerson amended this “faint praise.” Bettina’s book “now that I have read moves all my admiration.  What can be richer and nobler than that woman’s nature.  What life more pure and poetic amid the prose and derision of our own time.”  Bettina was, moreover, “the only formidable test that was applied to Goethe’s genius . . . genius purer than his own,” and Emerson found it “cowardly” that Goethe never directly acknowledged “the transcendant superiority of this woman’s aims and affections in the presence of which all his Art must have struck sail.”  His next letter to Fuller records his urging of the book on several friends.[16]

As we have seen, Fuller’s regard for von Arnim’s work, always more restrained than Emerson’s, had diminished as she had read Les Sept Cordes and Spiridion.  Next to these, the effusions of a “Lolita-like ingenue” (Caleb Crain’s epithet) struck Fuller as “mere babyhood.”[17]  In the fall of 1839, as she tried repeatedly to bring Emerson to understand Sand’s merit, he was unmoved; his sense of Bettina’s excellences impeded his ability to catch the seriousness in Fuller’s praise for Sand.  On August 14, responding probably to her first flush of excitement, he wrote mockingly,

And pray who & what is the spectacle you so oracularly announce?  Is it book or is it woman? . . .  I have with my eyes transpierced so many goodly reputations & found them paper, that when the wind is east I make a covenant with my ears never to hearken to a new report.  And yet to such a herald all faith is due, and at all events I will sit with meek expectation.

Three days later she sent him her notes and the Bristol journal, which he answered on September 9 with praise for her comments on Alfred de Vigny—and with complete silence on her reflections on Sand.  In early November he noted in his journal that he had read “Linnaeus’s Tour in Lapland, & two French novels,” adding a note of appreciation for the Linnaeus work but dismissing the novels as “lamp smoke & indigestion.”  These novels, which he names in a letter to Fuller on November 14, were by Sand (André and Leone Léoni; he also bought Indiana about this time).  Although he acknowledges that he has not followed her directions about which Sand works to read first, he nevertheless pronounces largely on her value as a writer in terms that make his standard of comparison clear:

A fervid eloquence certainly this woman has, & makes sometimes authentic revelations of what passes in man & in woman.  there are a few wonderful things in the book but she is not superior to her story, I fancy, but is herself sick with the sickness of the French intellect & has not surmounted this taste for the morgue & the hells.  Pity too that with so much narrative eloquence she cannot clear her plot of such ridiculous improbabilities.  With all the manifest strength & steadiness of this woman, I will not compare her to Bettina a moment on such evidence as I have.  She is but a Parisian Corinna, Bettina a sublime original.

Emerson modified this judgment somewhat after he read Spiridion in late December, but even in his praise, he remained cool.  The book “discovers wonderful opulence of mind—it is all brilliant, inventive, never poor,” but he found it too long: “after the first conversation, we wish the doctrine less voluminous, that is, we wish it had more profoundness.”  Perhaps remembering that Fuller had absorbed this work “with unutterable interest,” Emerson seems to cast about for something positive to say—“A marvelous variety of accomplishment this writer has, who knows nature & society & books so well and takes in one book such scholastic and in another such Parisian glances”—but the primary note is reserve.  He ends with a cursory note of enthusiasm for one passage near the end (“Beautiful account of the fisher’s music in Spiridion p 334 I believe!”).[18]  He kept reading Sand, but the next novel he tried, Mauprat, served only as distraction from grief over the untimely death of Charles Follen in the sinking of the steamer Lexington, and the impetus to continue faded.  His letters and journals record no reflection on Sand until almost three years later, when in a letter to John Heath, again praising von Arnim, he noted, “She is a finer genius than George Sand or Mme de Stael, more real than either, more witty, as profound, & greatly more readable.  And where shall we find another woman to compare her with.”[19]

            Fuller, I believe, was disappointed, most sharply on receiving Emerson’s 23 December 1839 letter with its ho-hum response to Spiridion.  Her letter to him three days later alludes to a grim emotional state (“I am on the Drachenfels, and cannot get off; it is one of my naughtiest moods”), from which she has determined to extricate herself by reading Plato.  The ploy is partly successful, but her description of the work she has put aside in order to right herself suggests the influence of Sand:

Last Sunday, I wrote a long letter, describing it [i.e., her mood] in prose and verse, and I had twenty minds to send it to you as a literary curiosity; then I thought, this might destroy relations, and I might not be able to be calm and chip marble with you any more, if I talked to you in magnetism and music; so I sealed and sent it in the due direction.

What she describes is an exorcism, followed by an embrace of the rationalist Plato, hoping “to be tuned up thereby.”  She observes, “with gladness, a keener insight in myself, day by day,” but sees the cost: “after all, could not make a good statement this morning on the subject of beauty.”[20]

* * * * *

The work of Margaret Fuller’s that most clearly reflects her complex encounter with Sand’s 1830s oeuvre, I propose, is “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” written in October-November 1840 and published in The Dial’s third issue in January 1841.  Two other Dial pieces are usually linked with “Magnolia”:  “Leila,” in the fourth issue, and “Yuca Filamentosa,” in the seventh issue.  All three bear the impress of Fuller’s reading of Sand, but I focus here on “Magnolia” because its structure derives from narrative and thus is generically closest to Sand’s work.  But it is important to re-emphasize that Fuller’s goal was never to reproduce the precise kind of texts that Sand published.  Sand inspired her to believe that she could write “like a man[,] of the world of intellect and action,” including also the female themes of “love and hope and disappointment.”   In the flush of this inspiration, Fuller did not give much thought to the particular “shapes” such writing would take: she knew only that she had seen “stars as fair, almost as many,” as those implied by the vision of Hélène from atop the cathedral.  Hélène is “knowledge of the passions, and of social institutions, with the celestial choice which [rises] above them.”  It is the fusion of mystic exaltation, the intellect, a perspective uniquely available to women, and an ability to write (as a woman) like a man that George Sand appears to stand for in Fuller’s imagination.

            It is also important to distinguish between what Fuller wrote as a result of her first reading of the 1830s works and what she later wrote about Sand for publication.  This distinction embodies an obstacle Samuel Ward had noted in an 1839 letter to Longfellow: “I wish [Sand] might be criticized here—but a Reviewer would be forced to endure a censorious and moral [grimace?] and she is excessively heterodox.”[21]  Sand’s “genius” deserves the attention, but a reviewer would be necessarily and fatally constrained in the praise s/he could extend.  Fuller’s published comments on Sand—in the Dial (“The Great Lawsuit,” expanded in Woman in the Nineteenth Century) and in three articles for the New York Tribune—span a three year period and bridge the moment when the appearance of Consuelo and The Countess of Rudolstadt gave prudish readers a reason to “forgive” the earlier radical outlaw.  Careful examination of the evolving perspective of these four (really, five) pieces is a subset of this current study, but I would argue, briefly, that the various rhetorical positionings Fuller adopts in these remarks are in part the result of her sense of what the public could be induced to listen to, more than straightforward statements to be taken at face value as Fuller’s opinion.  I don’t mean to suggest duplicity, yet the private and public remarks are strikingly different.

In “The Great Lawsuit” (Dial, July 1843), Fuller expresses a sympathetic understanding of the circumstances that led to Sand’s rebellion, but she is harsh on her nonetheless, reproducing the standard inflammatory description of her smoking and male clothing and chastising her for speaking “in the heat of wild impulse” out of “passionate error.”  Society, Fuller says, is right to outlaw such women: they are perhaps the prophets, but not the parents, of a new era.  The revision for Woman in the Nineteenth Century (February 1845) does not soften the criticism, although Fuller’s inclusion of Elizabeth Barrett’s two poems about Sand interestingly intensifies both the sympathy and the dismissal: Barrett has “precisely the qualities that the author of Simon and Indiana lacks” and is the kind of person “unblemished in character . . . pure in soul” who offer a helping hand to women “noble in nature, but clouded by error.”  The first Tribune piece, however (1 February 1845), although it also includes the Barrett poems and Fuller’s praise for Barrett at Sand’s expense, is distinctly gentler: Sand is “a person of strong passions, but of original nobleness and a love of right sufficient to guide them all to the service of aims.”  And there is direct focus on her work, as opposed to her life.  Fuller praises Sand’s ability to transcribe her mind so exactly—her “nature glows beneath the words, like fire beneath the ashes, deep;--deep!”   Seven months later (19 September 1845), Francis Shaw’s translation of Consuelo has begun appearing in the Harbinger; Fuller writes to call attention to it and to revisit the sentiments of her earlier published comments.  Now, “let no man confound the bold unreserve of Sand with that of those who have lost the feeling of beauty and the love of good.”  Readers are asked to recognize the “upward tendency and growing light [in] all her works for several years past.”   And when Shaw’s translation was complete, Fuller wrote (24 June 1846) that Sand was “the best living French writer, and in some respects the best living prose writer.”  Those who would demur on the basis of the author’s stained life are admonished that “there is in her a soul so capable of goodness and honor as to depict them most successfully in her ideal forms.—It is her works and not her private life that we are considering.”[22]

Of course, even in Fuller’s 1839 journal notes, as described above, there are reservations: Sand’s “horrors” are disgusting, as is the “sophistry of passion,” and Lettres d’un Voyageur had annoyed her with its pictures of an “unfortunate woman wailing her loneliness, wailing her mistakes, writing for money.”  Sand’s genius and “manly grasp of mind” were offset, Fuller complained, by her lack of a “manly heart,” and Fuller grumbled about the disappointment she felt at not consistently finding in Sand “a being to combine a man’s mind and a womans heart . . . who yet finds life too rich to weep over.”[23]  Yet these failings are not those conventional ones bemoaned in her statements intended for wide consumption.  And in any case they pale in the context of Fuller’s initial and constant enthusiasm for the novels--inspiration, I believe, for the clearest proof of her admiration of Sand: imitation.

* * * * *

As Fuller related in a letter of 19 October 1840 to William H. Channing, the stories of the magnolia and the yucca came to her from a family friend, Dr. William Eustis, who described his gardening one evening to Fuller’s mother while Fuller herself lay resting on the couch.  Fuller transcribed a brief version of “Yuca” in the letter and noted also that Eustis’ “interview” with the magnolia was “most romantic.”  Jeffrey Steele’s reading of these two works in Transfiguring America brilliantly enlarges the context by associating their origins with the sentiments of Fuller’s remarkable letter to Caroline Sturgis on October 22 and with her reaction to Anna Barker’s feeling “kindled” during the first meeting of her Conversations on November 4.  Steele regards these texts and “Leila” as expressive of “some of the most radical theological currents in American society,” representing “one of the first systematic attempts by an American woman to map the psychological changes that would accompany a reconfiguration of America’s dominant gender mythology.” Given such claims and his careful investigation of both local and cultural context, one regrets that his reading includes no reference to Fuller’s reactions to Sand, which invoke most of the themes Steele finds in these Dial works.[24]

“One who feels like me must either be or write a poem,” Fuller wrote at the beginning of her Bristol journal after reading Spiridion.  The third section of Fuller’s notes on Sand, ending with the comment that this reading has encouraged her to try to write in Sand’s mode, is preserved in a transcribed version.  Steele’s chapter “Lunar Flowers” begins with an analysis of two fragments, “Moonlight” and “Moonlights,” the second of which immediately follows the notes on Sand in this transcription.  Although Steele does not address it, this fragment includes a long untitled poem beginning “These pallid blooms thou wilt not disdain,” which anticipates the images and themes of “Magnolia” and is perhaps Fuller’s first effort to “paint” in a mode inspired by Sand.  The “pallid blooms” (columbines, we learn midway through) are not the kind of flowers that “tell the Soul,” nor do they attract crowds of admirers.  Like the elusive Magnolia, they are “[s]elf-nurtured, self-sustaining, self-approved.”  The lesson they impart is “to live alone / To deck whatever spot the fates provide / with graces worthy of the garden’s pride,” a version of the story the Magnolia tells about her own coming-into-being.  In lines that might allude to the sources of the poem and that recall Fuller’s notes especially on Les Sept Cordes and Spiridion, the speaker says these musings are “faint shadows of some beauteous hand / When to the soul the highest thoughts have spoken / And brightest hopes from pregnant twilight broken.”  If this poem is indeed related to Fuller’s earliest reflections on the impact of Sand, it is plausible to read “Magnolia” as the development of this impact—and much about the Rider’s encounter with the mystical Magnolia evokes particulars of Fuller’s reaction to Sand’s “lyric effusions.”[25] 

            In general, the work’s dramatized encounter between sharply-distinguished modes of perception and understanding echoes the central tension of Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre.  Albertus’s determined rationalism (he serves the god of Pythagoras and Plato; he can describe Hélène’s beauty only as “harmonious” [29]) has its analogue in the Rider’s preoccupation with the expression “He was fulfilled of all nobleness.”[26]  Perhaps there is a difference “wide as from heaven to earth,” as the Rider claims, between nobleness and the fulfillment of nobleness, but I suspect the purpose of the second paragraph is to establish the Rider’s “before” character—before he meets the Magnolia, before the extraordinary sensual experience of the Magnolia’s fragrance interrupts his dry (and very male) “meditation.”  The first paragraph serves as a précis of the whole work; it is the wisdom the narrator has gleaned from the experience he is about to relate, a truth about finding the answer to all wishes at one’s feet once one learns the connection between stars and flowers.  Prior to learning that truth, he was the abstraction-loving youth who fixed his eyes on “distant worlds of light.”  As in Les Sept Cordes, there is synesthetic blending: the Magnolia’s scent is a poetic “voice” that the Rider both smells and hears, and it is musical as well—like “the full peal of an organ” (44-45). 

            Although Albertus acknowledges that he has too much emphasized thought at the expense of sensual experience, and although his student Wilhelm’s love for Hélène obscurely represents for him an alternative to the asceticism he has embraced, he at first can conceptualize Hélène only negatively, as a “pretty face” whose perceptions are “limited” and who is wearied by metaphysical subtleties (39).  Hélène’s first appearance illustrates that she has hitherto taken her self-image from Albertus’s conception of her, a psychological state like the Magnolia’s in her earlier incarnation as an orange blossom. But as soon as she picks up the lyre—a claiming of her birthright and also an emblem of her comprehension of the true sources of power—she is transformed: a halo surrounds her and her language becomes “sublime” (85).  The philosophy students immediately perceive this sea-change:

[Hanz:] There is some marvel at work here.  The ribbons of her hair break and fall at her feet.  Her locks seem animated as though a magic breath disengages them from their shining bonds to scatter them down her brow and pour them out in a flood of gold over her snowy shoulders.  Yes, see how her hair billows out in free and lusty rings, like those of a young child that runs in the morning wind.  It glistens, it flares, it streams over her beautiful body, like a cascade seized with fire from the sun.  O Helen, how beautiful you are now! (86)

In this altered state Hélène repudiates her fiancée Wilhelm and retreats to the natural world (“I shall go to see the rising of the moon over the lake. . . . I neither hear nor see anyone.  Nothing exists for me any more.  I am alone forever” [91]) in a sequence that is reproduced both stylistically and imagistically in Fuller’s flower’s translation from social orange blossom to queenly, private Magnolia.  In both works the transformed being is limned in language inaccessible to unreconstructed ears; the Magnolia cannot speak to the Rider of the queen/guardian of the flowers, a spirit “which cannot be known until thou art it” (48).  And after her rhapsodic narrative is concluded, the Magnolia retreats from communication with “alien spirit[s],” not wishing again to tell the tale of her being “in words that divide it from itself” (49).

            It is in the specific nature and effect of the transformation, however, that the works most closely resemble one another and in which Sand’s influence on Fuller is clearest.  Sand’s heroic being is female, yet male in her impulse to rise above “finite things” and be devoured by “love of the infinte” (176).  In dying, she enacts the lyre’s plea to her: “if you dare to take me and enclose me in your intelligence, I agree to lose myself there, to assimilate myself to it forever” (170).  Thereafter, she speaks as a dual being, promising Albertus that “we” will always be with him.  Hélène’s significance for Fuller, her notes testify, is both that she is a purified Gretchen-like being and that she is “worthy to redeem and upbear the wise man, who stumbled into the pit of error while searching for truth.”  Further, Hélène reconciles “the life of the heart with that of the intellect”; she can listen simultaneously to the “whispering breeze of the Spirit, while breasting, as a man should, the surges of the world.”

            Fuller’s Magnolia, as Steele suggests, is an instance of a female narrator defining masculine values that she learns to resist.  In that sense she is the newly-awakened Hélène.  But as Steele also notes, the male Rider seems to “switch gender” (74).  He incorporates aspects of the Magnolia’s perspective into an enlarged view: his masculine self endorses the Magnolia’s redefined female essence that replaces the conventional femininity of the orange blossom.  The Rider, then, is able to comprehend the Magnolia.  He repeats the ritual she has earlier enacted, taking “a step inward,” forgetting a voice, losing a power, signified by his not leaving the Magnolia but rather “abid[ing] forever in the thought to which the clue was found in the margin of that lake” (49).  Again, the framing first paragraph affords insight into this reconstructed male-female narrator; s/he knows and can reproduce the language of the queen of the flowers because s/he has become “it.”

            Certain aspects of Fuller’s experience of Spiridion are also echoed in “Magnolia.”   In terms of form, the novel’s extended first-person account of spiritual questing perhaps provided a model for incorporating the Magnolia’s tale within a framing narrative.  This issue evoked comment from both Fuller and Emerson, she noting the difference (from Les Sept Cordes) of the “mould” into which the development of the religious sentiment is poured, and he put off by the length of the discourse (“after the first conversation we wish the doctrine less voluminous”).  Fuller also resonated to the pivotal role played by the natural world in Father Alexis’s “new birth,” a response to a passage in which Alexis, soul-sick, lies on a grassy mound between the monastery and the sea and  loses himself in attentiveness to nature: “There, lost in endless reveries, I seemed to become sensible of harmonies inappreciable to the gross sense of other men, some plaintive chaunt, breathed on the dark coast, and borne over the waters by the southern winds . . .” (224).  This experience is life-transforming; Alexis, through discovering “deep meaning in the slightest phenomena of nature,” recovers a sense of happiness and a more just view of the balance of human joy and suffering:

Every creature took a new form and voice, to reveal to me faculties unknown to the cold and superficial observation which I had taken for the purposes of science.  Infinite mysteries unfolded themselves around me, contradicting all the decisions of an incomplete knowledge and precipitate judgment.  In a word, life assumed in my eyes a sacred character, and a vast aim, of which I had not had a glimpse, either in religion or in science, and which my heart taught anew to my erring intellect. (225)

Immediately following this passage is the section Emerson remarked on in a postscript to his December 23 letter, Alexis’s description of hearing a fisherman “singing to the stars.”  The fisherman’s song instinctively follows the measure of the waves, so that the singer strikes Alexis as “one of those great and true artists whom nature herself takes care to instruct” and leads him to feel that music “must be the true poetical language of man” (226).  This portrait of the quester determined to develop his sensual apparatus so that it becomes a gradus ad Parnassum is another of the important impressions Spiridion made upon Fuller:

I recognized, with delight, the eye that gazed, the ear that listened, till the specters came, as they do to the highlander on his rocky couch, to the German peasant on his mountain.  How different from the vulgar eye which looks, but never sees!  (Memoirs I.247)

The ways in which these elements of Sand’s novel seem to reverberate in the Rider’s experience in “Magnolia” are clear.

* * * * *

            Fuller kept her authorship of “Magnolia” private from Emerson; when he read it in January 1841, he did not guess she had written it.  After she claimed it as her work, Emerson wrote, cryptically:

I read it with gladness & good will: Depart ye profane this is of me & mine! . . . The Magnolia is a new Corinna with a fervid Southern eloquence that makes me wonder as often before how you fell into the Massachusetts.  It is rich and sad—sad it should not be—if one could only show why not!—but the piece will have a permanent value.[27]

Possibly the reference to “a new Corinna” suggests his sense of the work’s derivation from Sand—remember that in a letter of 14 November 1839 he had scorned Sand as “but a Parisian Corinna” (inferior to Bettina, the “sublime original”)—but whether he consciously associated Fuller and Sand or not, and despite his seeming praise, the prevailing tone is less than enthusiastic for this new direction.  Why would “good will” be needed to read the piece?  Why would he view it as sad?  Why, if it is, should it not be sad?  Why can’t he explain why it shouldn’t be?  What is “a” permanent value, as against simple permanent value?  Why the nervy act of appropriation (“this is of me & mine”), when “Magnolia” feels quite, quite distant from anything Emersonian? 

            Steele’s reading of “Magnolia” emphasizes its role in a patient effort on Fuller’s part to make her otherness comprehensible to her admired friend and mentor, and such a reading is certainly supported by their letters during this time.  One would appreciate evidence that Emerson did indeed hear, but such as exists is slim and ambiguous.  When he was first reading Sand, he noted the following in his journal (17 November 1839):

Eyes.  Women see better than men.  Men see lazily if they do not expect to act.  Women see quite without any wish to act.  Men of genius are said to partake of the masculine & feminine traits.  They have this feminine eye, a function so rich that it contents itself without asking any aid of the hand.

We can, if we wish, dream the French novelist’s agency, and Fuller’s, in moving Emerson toward a perception of women more subtle (and more modern, or at least more self-conscious) than that of most men of his historical moment.  But this note, beginning with a statement of women’s superiority, slides into appreciation for the putative androgynous vision of men of genius.  And we remember his preference for Bettina over either Sand or de Staël—or, perhaps, over Margaret Fuller, although in the year after her death, in trying to strike the right tone for the Memoirs, he wrote to Samuel Gray Ward that the work must come across “tête exaltée, and in the tone of Spiridion, or even Bettine, with the coolest ignoring of Mr. Willis, Mr. Carlyle and Boston and London.”   To Caroline Sturgis, similarly: the book “must be written in the bravest mood of Spiridion, or of Bettine, better yet of Dante,--mystically in Novalis’ sense, that is, as if the world were one pair of lovers.”  We might have hoped that he would eventually distinguish more sharply between Spiridion and Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child.[28]

            Nonetheless, though he shared her interest in Sand (and in what Sand represented for her) only to a degree, he seemed genuinely glad to hear, in 1847, that Fuller had met the celebrated lady. “It was high time, dear friend, that you should run out of the coop of our bigoted societies full of fire damp & azote, and find some members of your own expansive fellowship,” he wrote at the end of April.[29]  Fuller had approached the meeting feeling disadvantaged by her inability to speak French fluently, and then she suffered other small impediments before the two were finally face to face, but when Sand entered the room, Fuller was deeply struck by the “almost ludicrous” contrast between the dignified, “lady-like” woman before her and the “vulgar caricature idea” that most Americans, herself included, had so readily embraced. 

[W]hat fixed my attention was the expression of goodness, nobleness, and power, that pervaded the whole,--the truly human heart and nature that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "C'est vous" and held out her hand. I took it, and went into her little study; we sat down a moment, then I said, "Il me fait de bien de vous voir" and I am sure I said it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so developed a character, and everything that is good in it so really good. I loved, shall always love her.

Fuller stayed most of the day.  She provided few details of their conversation, but the view of Sand that emerges from her narrative confirms Emerson’s sense of the value to her of entering this fellowship.  Fuller felt that she and Sand had “always known one another” and noted that Sand’s position as “an intellectual woman and good friend” was “the same as my own in the circle of my acquaintance.”   Certain aspects of the mythic Sand persona faded.  She lacked an “independent, interior life,” and she was not “a Helena” (by which Fuller apparently meant the kind of woman “whose mistakes are the fault of the present state of society”—not quite the way she had earlier described the heroine of Les Sept Cordes).  The actual Sand was better: “I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never liked a woman better.”  In fact, Fuller, continued,

[s]he needs no defence, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature, and always with good intentions. She might have loved one man permanently, if she could have found one contemporary with her who could interest and command her throughout her range; but there was hardly a possibility of that, for such a person. Thus she has naturally changed the objects of her affection, and several times. Also, there may have been something of the Bacchante in her life, and of the love of night and storm, and the free raptures amid which roamed on the mountain-tops the followers of Cybele, the great goddess, the great mother. But she was never coarse, never gross, and I am sure her generous heart has not failed to draw some rich drops from every kind of wine-press. 

Eight years earlier, Fuller’s substantial delight in the work was reduced by her disappointment in Sand’s public plaints about her life circumstances.  In 1847, although Sand “holds her place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems full of energy and courage in it,” it was not the work that Fuller emphasized.  The recently-published Teverino and La Mare au Diable were  “as original, as masterly in truth, and as free in invention” as anything she had done earlier, but the real joy Fuller took was from the life, the grace with which it was lived, the reasons for it, the passion of it.  Fuller’s narrative concludes with a retailing of gossip regarding Sand’s relationships with Chopin and Liszt, with admiration for and possibly even envy of this womanly and manly person who redefined boundaries and provided maps for those interested in staking a claim in this new terrain.

Notes