American Prophetess
© 4 March 2007
Rev. Marti Keller
Arguably the marker cultural phenomenon we’ve got going now is American Idol. On any Tuesday, Wednesday
and Thursday night, there are 50 or so million TV viewers who watch to see who Simon will trash, whose singing
performance is too pitchy or pitch perfect. And then text message in their vote, a kind of balloting I’ve
yet to
master.
I am not too proud to say I am usually among them, cheering for my favorites,
puzzling over those who seem to
slip on through by virtue of their smiles or their fashionable pouts. Never voting
mind you, but captivated by the
possibility that the bank teller from Detroit or the church choir singer from
North Carolina might get picked and go
gold.
So I report with more than a smidgen of generational disappointment, even judgment,
that last week, when the
remaining 20 young men and women were asked to name the person who inspired them
and all of them selected
family members—slim blond wives who said yes to much less pretty princes, mothers who woke them up and
forced them to go down to audition, grandmas and brothers and fiancés, I was
both predictably touched and
surprisingly disappointed.
I realized the inclination was toward a kind of this is dedicated to the one
I love moment, but the question as I
chose to hear it, was about inspiration,. Which for me invoked both the everyday
notion of practical
encouragement and the loftier notion of prophetic muse.
Who was the man or woman whose vision or deeds shaped them?
Ok, I know that was asking a great deal of contestants in a singing competition
as we are often reminded. But it is
my fantasy that if for some reason I was ever in the hootenanny version American
folk idol, that when my moment
came to stand in front of the camera and name my inspiration, to make my dedication,
that I would say Joni
Mitchell, whose lyrical contributions were, you must agree, ( or not) often prophetic.
Not the lines about moons and Junes and Ferris wheels, which were pleasant and
memorable, but the ones that
foretold of paving paradise and putting up parking lots, or her native Canadian
indictment of the United States, her
adopted country, that had come already to inspire so much terror in others. We
have all come, she sang, to fear
the beating of your drums. And when she urged us to imagine a cosmic change,
with bombers flying shotgun in
the sky, turning into butterflies across our nation, we knew we in the imaginative
far-seeing presence of someone
who was convicted of a better way. The stuff of Elijah and Isaiah.
Her soaring, circular words. Her singular shining prophetic presence.
Biblically speaking, there were only seven women recognized as prophets or prophetesse
:Sarah, Miriam,
Deborah, Chanah, Abigail, Chulda and Esther. In the most traditional sense, prophets
are those who are believed
to be speaking on behalf of God or other spirits. Another more expanded but accepted
definition is that a prophet
informs a religious community about what they are doing wrong, how they are deviating
from the path expected
from them, Urging them to change their ways.
When I think about our Transcendental Unitarian prophetess Margaret Fuller, it
in that same sense—a charismatic
woman with a bold, brilliant and critical mind. With, as she wrote, a thirst
for truth and good, not love of sect and
dogma. A kind of an idol for her own time, not blond and singing, but dark haired
and scribbling--- hundreds of
words in articles, essays, speeches and journal entries over her tragically brief
life.
.
I will admit I knew very little about Margaret Fuller when I was first asked
to serve on the selection committee for
the Fuller awards program of the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation. I
knew she was one of our famous
women, who was part of the circle of Concord Massachusetts intellectuals who
were considered seminal figures in
the 19th century philosophical, literary and political renaissance in New England
called the American Bloomsbury.
The group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David
Thoreau, and Louisa May
Alcott.
What I soon learned as I joined the group of lay and ministerial colleagues whose
wonderful task was to solicit
and select scholarly, creative, and justice-seeking projects by contemporary
women was that she is a significant
and under-recognized prophetic voice from our liberal religious heritage. As
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.
Anthony wrote of her, she possessed more influence on the thought of American
women than any woman previous
to her time.
With her famous Boston women’s conversations, her editing of the Transcendental
journal, The Dial, and later her
book Woman of the l9th century, Fuller urged women to develop their potential
to participate equally with men in
the world.
Being a curious and diligent funding panel member, I gathered more details about
Margaret from the biographical
sketches available in collections of Unitarian and Universalist women’s writings
like Standing Before Us.
She was born to Unitarian parents in Cambridge in 1810. Her father was a liberal
politician and a supporter of
equality for women. He educated his already precocious daughter at home for several
years, instilling in her
principles of independence and moral courage which he derived both from his own
progressive beliefs and study of
Greek and Latin writers. She knew both languages by the time she was six years
old.
It has been written that Margaret reached adulthood as a formidably intelligent,
socially eccentric, not
conventionally attractive but by many accounts electric and sensual young woman
who was either intensively
disliked or intensely admired, but who could not be ignored.
One of her contemporaries described her as not beautiful, but more than beautiful.
A sort of glow surrounded her
and warmed those who listened. She has been called the sexy muse for her male
colleagues, and was
undoubtedly the model for Nathanial Hawthorne’s adulterous Hester Prynne in The
Scarlet Letter.
In the 1830’s and 1840’s, Fuller as editor of the Dial became a member of that
famous Transcendentalist circle
and club, in fact the only woman, besides perhaps Elizabeth Peabody, with any
regular presence among them.
In fact, if there was a prophet, mentor and muse for her it would have been Ralph
Waldo Emerson, whose home
she stayed in for a length of time on several occasions, staying up at night
for intimate bedside talks—more
intimate than his wife preferred. She took long walks with Hawthorne by the river
banks. With the aging Reverend
William Ellery Channing, she read German philosophy and theology.
Theologically, Transcendentalism- a commitment to finding the divine in the human
endeavor in concert with
nature was consistent with Fuller’s conviction that religion was in her own heart, writing that in terms of religious
institutions, she belonged nowhere. I have pledged myself, she declared, to nothing… I
have my own church
where I am by turns priest and layman.
Like other Transcendentalists of what one later critic called the old New England
sort, she believed herself to be a
child of God, and if a child then, an heir—a very condensed way of saying as
Caroline Dall, a fellow female
Transcendentalist wrote, that the spirit within her was the breath of creative
spirit and therefore in its reach, its
possibilities and its final destiny.
The constitution of the Transcendentalist community to whose principles Fuller
covenanted to adhere was
ethically demanding. They collectively vowed to promote what they saw as the
great purposes of human
culture—to establish the external relations of life on the basis of wisdom and
purity; to apply the principles of love
and justice to our social organization; to substitute a system of brotherly co-operation
for one of selfish
competition;
to secure for the young the benefits of the highest physical, intellectual and
moral education possible; to prevent
what they saw as the exercise of worldly anxiety by the competent supply of necessary
wants.
To diminish the thirst for accumulation- to guarantee physical support and spiritual
progress.
As lofty and challenging as these commands for human betterment were for all
of the members of this club, the
barriers still existing for women around access to formal education and vocations
made it even more daunting for
Margaret and the few other females in the circle. While the transcendentalists
asserted there was “no sex in
souls”, the outer world had many boundaries.
In still Puritan Boston, Margaret Fuller was refused admission to Harvard. Only
partly daunted by this educational
wall, she was able to procure all the books that Harvard Divinity School was
assigning. At 28, she set up reading
circles for women in her home and in Elizabeth Peabody’s foreign language bookstore, many of them the wives of
those transcendental intellectual giants who had gone to colleges through the front gates. Charging substantial
tuition to these women, equivalent to Harvard’s in some instances, she achieved
an admirable degree of economic
independence, at the same time inspiring in them a desire to learn and converse,
vs. the customary needlework
and idle gossip which Margaret forbad.
Do your minding, not your mending, she demanded, as she lectured (something largely
off limits publicly for
women of her era) on art, mythology, faith, education, and women’s rights.
It was said of her that her conversation was seldom heard equaled. In fact, Emerson
thought her the most
entertaining conversationalist of her time.
. Some of the money she earned went to pay as an unmarried woman to board with
a married couple, since living
alone was not an acceptable alternative. Some of the rest of it she used to finance
her own private anti-slavery
campaign and other causes.
While her reading and discussion circles were truly legendary and have been transcribed
and used as the model
for similar teas and conversations among Unitarian women today, the best documentation
for her prophetic social
witness comes from the pieces she did, both news and critiques, for the New York
Herald Tribune.
She was hired by famous editor Horace Greeley to write literary reviews in l844,
the first American woman to hold
such a position. He called her the most remarkable and in some respects the greatest
woman America had yet
known.
Not content to remain a reviewer, she took a trip to what was then the Western
frontier, describing in a book
called Summer on the Lakes the lives of the settlers in Illinois and Wisconsin
and the destitute survivors of the
native tribes they had displaced.
Moving from arts and literary critique to social witness and critique, she explored
the dark corners of New York,
producing stunning reformist exposes of conditions in the prisons, asylums, alms
houses and institutions for the
blind .
Among her most radical and far-sighted observations were about the plight of
women prisoners when in the 1840’s
authorities began jailing them for prostitution and public drunkenness. Few women
reformers would come to the
aid of women in jail because reformers wanted to avid risk their own status as
respectable middle-class ladies.
One woman, our Margaret Fuller did, noting in print that there was a need to
help discharged females, becoming
one of the first to argue that economic and social forces brought women into
prostitution.
She said she had always felt great interest in these women, who she wrote were
trampled in the mud to gratify the
appetites of men, and wished she might be brought into direct contact with them.
At the Bellevue Alms House, Fuller found people who received decent physical
care but sat staring in what she
described as vacant boredom. She called for books and education to help them
find jobs. The conditions at
Toombs prisons she found barbarous, the air in the upper galleries unendurable.
Fuller’s articles on asylum and
prison reform all stressed the same theme—kind care begets good results.
Like all prophets, who look at the world through their own human-ness no matter
how ardently they invoke the
divine, Margaret had blind spots—failing to see basic physical conditions beneath the holiday surface of mental
wards that cried out for change—and having an attitude toward Irish immigrants
who came fleeing the Potato
famine that was at best condescending, at worse hate-provoking.
She warned her readers that the Irish were foolishly romantic, extremely ignorant,
blindly devoted to the church,
lazy and ungrateful.
Margaret was not yet 35 when she wrote three especially harsh and damning columns
on what was deemed the
Irish Character, columns defended at the time because at least she called for
tolerance and patience in educating
them, rather then for violence and deportation.
Intrigued by the Italian revolution, she went there as a foreign correspondent,
met and perhaps married a young
Italian nobleman and bore his young son. On a visit home to America, their boat
shipwrecked off Fire Island, New
York within sight of shore. She was only 40 when she died.
I would like to imagine that a searching and sensitive a soul such as Margaret
would have continued to evolve in
her understanding of the conditions of new immigrants, of those she saw as Other.
That even this blind spot in her
prophetic nature would have been opened up to enlightenment.
No matter, Margaret Fuller remains more than a distant historical figure to me—she was and continues to be a
prophet for a new generation of Unitarians. Through our Women’s Federation and
its Margaret Fuller funding
program, she has inspired us to do our own work of honoring contemporary female
workers for peace and justice:
advocating for young women in the sex industry, providing a forum for Transylvanian
women to talk about their
private lives as wives and mothers, interviewing African American women in our
own liberal faith communities.
Her life may have been pitchy in places—off key, off the mark, but for me at
least
she is still ---an American Idol.
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