Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism by Cole Phyllis Argersinger Jana L. & Phyllis Cole

Author:Cole, Phyllis, Argersinger, Jana L. & Phyllis Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2014-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

As it had been for millennia, in the antebellum period the quintessential middle landscape of the garden was gendered feminine, whether figured as a cultivated settlement shy of the wilder masculine frontier or the delicate picturesque opposite the strenuous sublime.19 All three of the major transcendentalists readily co-opted the garden’s gender ideology to convey the middle landscape’s allure in provocative but culturally resonant ways. For example, in the famous passage from “Walking” cited earlier, Thoreau first feminizes “wildness” (as the wolf nursing Rome’s founders) into a middle landscape but then implies that it became both too feminine (in falling to the Goths) and not feminine enough (by recalling that the Goths themselves were breastfed in the forest) (Excursions, 202).20

That said, Thoreau and Emerson were often complacent about gender ideology, and so as conservationists working at a time when nature was routinely gendered female and humanity male, their complacency led to less-nuanced depictions of the human–nature relationship. Postbellum readers of the transcendentalists sensed this. For example, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a biographer of Fuller and champion of Thoreau’s environmentalism, ultimately favored Fuller’s conservationist phrasing, or so his 1886 Out-Door Papers suggests. Higginson was attuned to Thoreau’s allegiance to the middle landscape—he defended Thoreau in 1879 against the charge of “hat[ing] civilization” by pointing to his final decision in The Maine Woods to return from wild “barrenness” to the “partially cultivated country.”21 And he was undoubtedly familiar with Thoreau’s delicate observation in Walden that “fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her … than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation” (Walden, 210). But he still chose Fuller’s Summer, not Thoreau’s Walden, to make the following point:

The sentimentalist … say[s,] “if the object is … the enjoyment of Nature, why not go and enjoy her, without any collateral aim?” Because … if we have a collateral aim, we enjoy her far more.… Margaret Fuller’s fine saying touches [this] point,—“Nature will not be stared at.” Go out merely to enjoy her … and you begin to suspect yourself of affectation.… Go out under pretence of shooting on the marshes or botanizing in the forests; … swim with her, ride with her, run with her, and she gladly takes you back once more within the horizon of her magic.22

Thoreau and Fuller were articulating a similar idea, but Thoreau’s humans with collateral aims become “a part of” Mother Nature. Fuller’s nature is more complexly feminine, “not [to] be stared at” because she is severe, modest, coquettish, or perhaps all of these things. Fuller’s easy play with nature’s gender arouses Higginson’s own conservationist imagining that we remain in complex relation with nature rather than apart from or one with “her.” This nuanced sense of gender enabled Fuller, and the other green Exaltadas, to convey vividly how best to build, sustain, and use the feminized middle landscape.

Fuller would formally introduce the “Exaltadas” in the 1845 Woman, but their more patently green prototypes appear in Summer.

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