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American
Literature: Romanticism
Student Research Submissions
2013 |
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James Simpson
3.11.13
Crossing Boundaries in Margaret
Fuller’s
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843
My great interest in exploring American literature
is to find the discipline’s common ground with the social science of geography
(the subject of my undergraduate degree), as the combined approach seeks to
elucidate truths about the American experience and the cultural shaping of the
North American landscape.
Geography asks the questions
regarding why Americans settled where they did, while literature uncovers (or at
least tries
to do so) the often enigmatic impulses of the human heart; that common ground
between the two branches of scholarship is where the motivations—economic,
political, religious, sentimental—are imprinted on the land in the form of the
built and settled human landscape.
Travel writing is, as such, among the most fertile
records of how the American cultural landscape was viewed and understood at a
particular moment in time.
Indeed, much influential travel writing (no matter
the country in question) is often penned by outsiders, as distance from a
cultural experience often imparts a certain impartiality that creates for a more
honest observation.
Perhaps the most famous
example of this genre is Alexander de Tocqueville’s 1835
Democracy in
America.
And while we may find our own biases and viewpoints
regarding our home countries refreshed by the outsider’s perspective, there is a
rather different—but still as profitable—type of instruction to be had from the
pen of one’s own countryman; the virtue is often here found in the nuanced
illumination that can only come from someone who so thoroughly understands the
cultural subtleties of a place that deep meaning about common experiences can be
better illuminated.
(My own favorite in this
genre is William Least Heat Moon’s famous 1982 American travelogue,
Blue Highways.)
My goal and purpose in this
research exercise was to therefore acquaint myself with an American
Romantic
travel essayist whom I had not yet read, and to then examine her import as both
a writer and—implicitly, as a geographer—through the lens of scholarly research.
As such, the author and work
that I chose was in the genre of travel writing by native writers intimately
acquainted with the culture and traditions of America: Margaret Fuller’s
Summer on the
Lakes, in 1843.
Indeed, I limited myself to reading
the very influential first chapter of this work, describing her visit to Niagara
Falls; as such, I also focused on secondary scholarship that dealt with this
same chapter in great detail.
This scholarship (and I refer you to the below
works cited page for complete details) itself focuses on Fuller’s use of sublime
language to communicate her own conflicted feelings about American culture and
the place of contemporary women within society.
My own reading of these scholarly works was ideally
to find some insight into how a talented writer in 1843 interpreted the American
landscape.
My hopes were not disappointed; it seems plausible that
the obvious subject of Niagara Falls—water, in great motion—can be understood as
a symbol for the fluidity of boundaries in American culture (both symbolic and
actual) that were of course in great transition during that era when the
American territories were irresistibly expanding into native Indian lands, and
the rights of Man (slave, Indian, woman, and laborer) were matters that were
opening great regional divides in American culture (and ultimately, in the case
of slavery—would push us to Civil War).
Among the most
interesting insights in this research was the discussion of this symbolic
meaning of the water spilling over the falls (and creating a boundary between
American and Canada) by Susan L. Roberson in her essay, “The Politics of
Mobility: Self and Nation In-(Between) Margaret Fuller’s
Summer on the Lakes”:
Politics, history, and identity take
place and are tested in movement, in mobility, in the meeting grounds of geography
and cultures, the ‘in-between spaces’ that Homi Bhabha contends ‘provide the
terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood… that initiate new signs of
identify’….
Emplotted by waterways—falls, rapids, lakes, rivers—and
water crossings, Fuller’s journey and her narrative are marked by fluidity and
border crossings of various kinds as she interrogates life at the margins of the
nation….
The lakes and rivers, streams and rapids she visits and
writes about, then, are both markers of location and symbolic markers of theme,
for the ‘fluent’ (SoL, 73) quality of the water suggests freedom, mobility, and
the instability of borders.
Travel likewise intimates and encourages boundary
crossing, for it opens up new knowledge and self-cognitions for those afoot.
(53-55)
From Roberson’s viewpoint, Fuller’s
experience of the Niagara grandeur was about the dangers of crossing those
American boundaries both actual (the Niagara River), and metaphorical (the
crossing of cultural boundaries by women in American society).
In this realm of metaphorical divides, we come to
scholarship that identifies what those divides actually may be, and why, in
fact, Fuller is considered a romantic writer.
I will not burden this post with further long
quotes, but it will be useful to refer to several in brief to better elucidate
these researcher’s arguments; that, essentially, Fuller was a Transcendentalist
writer who approached nature as a vehicle toward spiritual harmony.
(She was so influential, in
fact, as to have directly influenced Emerson in his famous
Self-Reliance
[Warfel, 162, 167]).
In their
“Experiencing Niagara Falls from the Perspective of an Early Ecofeminist,”
Forbes and Jermier also identify this idea of boundary-crossing in Fuller’s
writing: “In
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Fuller maintains
a general sense of awe for nature and evokes the superiority of the
transcendental approach throughout” (324).
Again, what firmly identifies
Fuller as a Romanticist is her exploration of the sublime (and her use of
sublime language) throughout her narrative—although with a twist; Forbes and
Jermier also persuasively argue that she was an uneasy Transcendentalist, and
viewed the boundaries of American rivers and falls not so much as thresholds
that would triumphantly liberate the traveler’s soul, but would cause crises of
self-identify, because, boundaries can also arbitrarily
fragment
places—places both actual, and those which are the territories of the soul:
“Fuller went to Niagara Falls to experience the sublime (Zwarg, 1993).
She was disappointed that she essentially ‘got it
wrong,’ as she found the rapids above falls more moving than the spectacle of
the falls themselves.
She confessed to ‘stupidity in feeling most moved
in the wrong place’….
Fuller experiences a vulnerability that trapped and
victimized her.” (325)
Jeffrey Steele extends this
idea of psychological disharmony even further; he asserts that Fuller’s
Summer on the Lakes
was her attempt at “charting inner mythical landscapes as models of female
power” (140) in an effort to find a path to an American future in which women
had the full rights and opportunities as men.
There
is, indeed, something dream-like… mystical, perhaps… in Fuller’s
chain-of-consciousness-like narrative; like the history of America until the
close of the Nineteenth Century, it is a story of explorers and pathfinders;
Fuller, it seems, was both an explorer—a charter of roads and places in a
younger America—but also an explorer of the mind and soul; such explorers are
often Romanticists, for it would make a cold and unfamiliar narrative to read a
travel narrative in the literal prose of the Realists, for example, who have
lost that spark of hope that always attends a good adventure just beginning.
What, then, did I learn?
Much and more, although, like Fuller, I have no
answers.
Just as good travel writing always explores the human
heart as much (or more) than landscapes, so Fuller is instructive because she is
perceptive about human nature, and she approaches nature with an awe and
reverence that has that spirit of restlessness and fear that is truer to the
human condition than a peaceful “one-ness” that most Transcendentalists affect.
What I “learned” is that there may be more insight
into human nature in the Transcendental School than that taught by the tiresome
and heavy-handed harangues that are the currency of Emerson’s discourse.
Finally, a Transcendentalist
that I can like: a
pessimistic one. (I’d
argue that unhappiness is the fundamental state of human nature.)
There is, of course, much
room for further scholarly study of Transcendentalism, and no end to travel
writing (although, like scholarly writing, a most definite and finite end to
good
writing.)
The intersection of these disciplines may have much
fertile ground left to be explored.
I am glad that I met Fuller; perhaps it is fitting
that this introduction, like human contentment and belonging, should be so
fleeting.
Works Cited
Forbes, Linda C. and John M. Jermier.
“Experiencing Niagara Falls from the Perspective of
an Early Ecofeminist.”
Organization
& Environment.
Vol. 13.3 (Sep 2000): 322-337.
Print.
Roberson, Susan L.
Antebellum
American Writers and the Road.
New York: Routledge, 2011.
Print.
Steele, Jeffrey.
Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing.
Columbia:
University of Missouri Press.
2001.
Print.
Warfel, Harry R.
“Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
Critical
Essays on Margaret Fuller.
Ed. Joel Myerson.
Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980.
