SOURCE: Kolodny, Annette. “Margaret Fuller: Recovering Our Mother's Gardens.” In The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860, pp. 112-30. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Kolodny contends Margaret Fuller's travel writings, particularly Summer on the Lakes, express the existence of an Edenic world that is beyond the reach of women because of their domestic captivity.]

When Mary Austin Holley first visited Texas in the autumn of 1831, she brought rose slips from her daughter's garden in Kentucky to plant around her brother's home at Bolivar; some years later, she set out “the first strawberries in Texas.”¹ If the women who first contemplated making a home for themselves on the vast expanse of the American prairies thus felt the need to bring their gardens with them, a later generation claimed to discover on those same prairies a ready-made “garden interspersed with cottages, groves, and flowery lawns.”² The promotional appeals to a prairie Eden had had their effect—even on a self-willed New Englander who anticipated only antipathy at “‘the encircling vastness,’” a woman who came “to the west prepared for the distaste I must experience at its mushroom growth” (SL, pp. 35, 28).

To be sure, Margaret Fuller was not contemplating settlement nor was she even an early visitor to a raw frontier. In 1840, the year Eliza Farnham left Illinois for upstate New York, bidding farewell to the “land of the … stirring future,”³ more than a third of the nation's population lived west of the Appalachians. Indeed, in May of 1843, as Margaret Fuller took the train to Buffalo and from there a steamer across the Great Lakes to Chicago, a thousand emigrants in ox-drawn covered wagons were beginning the “Great Emigration” overland to Oregon. For those less intrepid, however, the comparative speed and relative comfort of the rail and steamboat systems offered Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory as easily accessible destinations, even as these same conveyances also carried summer tourists anxious to throw off “the routine that so easily incrusts us” (SL, p. 170). It was thus a middle west undergoing rapid expansion and even more rapid change that Margaret Fuller visited in the summer of 1843.

All of this she duly noted. But what make her observations of particular interest is that they betray the frustration of the very fantasy that the women promotionalists were then promising as daily reality to their sisters who would come as settlers to the prairies. For, like Holley and Farnham before her, Margaret Fuller too believed that she had discovered on these open and rolling grasslands “the very Eden which earth might still afford” (SL, p. 122). Unlike Holley and Farnham, she came to understand and—more important—to express, as they could not, how that Eden might at once exist and yet be unavailable to women.

Scarcely a year after she gave up her editorial duties on the Dial—a year filled with writing, translating, and conducting her famous “conversations” for women in order to eke out a precarious living—Margaret Fuller reluctantly accepted a gift of fifty dollars from her friend, the liberal Universalist minister, James Freeman Clarke, so that she might join him and his sister on a tour of what was then still denominated the American Northwest. It was her first trip beyond the confines of New England and upstate New York. With her, as she took the train from Boston to Buffalo, were three close friends: Caroline Sturgis, who left the party at Buffalo, and James Freeman Clarke and his sister, the artist and illustrator, Sarah Freeman Clarke. The little party stopped first at Niagara Falls and then, taking the steamer out of Buffalo, traveled five and a half days to Chicago. From there, James Freeman Clarke returned to the east, entrusting the two women to the care of his brother, William Hull Clarke, who owned a business in Chicago. After two weeks in that city, William Hull Clarke seated his two visitors in a horse-drawn covered wagon, loaded it with provisions, and struck out across the south end of De Kalb County, through Lee County, to the Rock River country, proving himself, as Fuller would later write, “a guide, equally admirable as marshal and companion, who knew by heart the country and its history” (SL, p. 36).

After a fortnight's ramble, the three returned to Chicago, and from there Margaret and Sarah journeyed on by boat to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, the women hired a driver and a carriage to take them on a similar exploration across the Wisconsin Territory. On both occasions, while Sarah Freeman Clarke filled a sketch pad, Margaret Fuller kept a journal. In it, she noted down all that she encountered and experienced, hoping thereby “to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos” (SL, p. 28). The fruit of that wooing was Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, published the next year in Boston and illustrated by Sarah's sketches. It was Margaret Fuller's first original book (her previous books having been translations from the works of German authors).

Despite having “come to the west prepared for the distaste I must experience at its mushroom growth” (SL, p. 28), and despite some initial apprehension at the unaccustomed openness of the terrain, Fuller, like Holley and Farnham, was captivated by the landscape. If “at first, the prairie seemed to speak of the very desolation of dulness,” once she had taken her first ride out and “seen the flowers, and observed the sun set with that calmness seen only in the prairies, and the cattle winding slowly to their homes in the ‘island groves,’” she admitted that she “began to love, because I began to know the scene, and shrank no longer from ‘the encircling vastness’” (SL, pp. 34-35). That vastness, in fact, quickly took on the association it had held for Holley: the open and rolling prairies dotted with “island groves” struck Fuller as parklike and cultivated. “Illinois,” she observed, “bears the character of country which has been inhabited by a nation skilled like the English in all the ornamental arts of life, especially in landscape gardening.” “The villas and castles seem to have been burnt,” she acknowledges, “but the velvet lawns, the flower gardens, the stately parks, … the frequent deer, and the peaceful herd of cattle,” all these remain (SL, pp. 43-44).

If her first view of the prairie flowers, then in full bloom, evoked “a sort of fairy-land exultation never felt before” (SL, p. 34), so too the “excursion of two or three weeks” (SL, p. 35) across Illinois represented a kind of paradise regained. Setting forth “in a strong wagon, … loaded with every thing we might want … for buying and selling were no longer to be counted on” (SL, pp. 35-36), Fuller and her companions wandered at their leisure, following neither road nor guidebook, and depending on the kindness of the climate or the hospitality of the local farmhouses for the night's lodging. Having thus radically dispensed with “the routine that so easily incrusts us” (SL, p. 170), Fuller could compare her liberation to nothing less than the original earthly ideal. “There was neither wall nor road in Eden,” she noted, and “those who walked there lost and found their way just as we did” (SL, p. 65).

Precisely this idealized, Edenic quality impelled Fuller to caution her readers to expect neither guidebook nor conventional travel diary as its result. She eschews references to mileage or direction because “I … do not know how many miles we travelled each day, nor how many in all.” And she will not note landmarks or waystations of “the geography … inasmuch as it seemed to me no route, nor series of stations, but a garden interspersed with cottages, groves, and flowery lawns, through which a stately river ran.” Instead of the conventional catalogue of places and facts, in other words, Fuller explains that “what I got from the journey was the poetic impression of the country at large”; and that, she insists, “is all I have aimed to communicate” (SL, p. 67). To put it another way: what she got from the journey—whether in Illinois or Wisconsin—was less an impression of physical topography than an immersion in the fantasies that that topography seemed to invite. And what she communicated—even if unwittingly—was her own idiosyncratic version of the domestic dreams awakened for Holley and Farnham on similar landscapes.

The “poetic impression” that Fuller repeatedly sought in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory was the “habitation of man” settled unobtrusively “like a nest in the grass, … thoroughly … harmonized with what was natural” (SL, p. 38). So taken was she with the parklike beauty of the prairie that she did not wish to see it displaced by settlement. At the same time, however, she recognized in the fertile and well-watered grasslands a potential economic refuge from the hard scrabble farms of her native New England, where sons fled to the cities or the frontier to seek a livelihood and daughters left home for fourteen-hour days and slave wages in the proliferating textile mills and shoe factories. Obviating “those painful separations, which already desecrate and desolate the Atlantic coast,” Fuller believed, were the prairies, where “whole families might live together,” generation upon generation. Here, she mused, “the sons might return from their pilgrimages to settle near the parent hearth,” and “the daughters might find room near their mother” (SL, p. 60).

To protect both features of her vision—the beauty of the landscape and the unbroken, prospering family—Fuller insisted that, on the expansive prairies, “a man … may have water and wood and land enough” and yet still “afford to leave some of it wild, and to carry out his own plans without obliterating those of nature” (SL, p. 60). With all the zeal of a promotionalist—or, in her case, the fervor of a fantasist—she pointed to the home of “an Irish gentleman,” praising “the unobtrusive good taste of all the arrangements, [which] showed such intelligent appreciation of the spirit of the scene.” Since Illinois is already a natural park, she explains, “his park, his deer-chase, he found already prepared; he had only to make an avenue through it” (SL, p. 45). Elsewhere, at “a double log cabin” near the town of Oregon, Illinois, she describes what is to her eye, “the model of a Western villa. Nature had laid out before it grounds which could not be improved” (SL, p. 58). Nor have its owners made any attempt to do so, she implies.

The few improvements she did applaud enhanced rather than disfigured the landscape, in her view, because they stood as emblems of the idealized domesticity she would see in the west. Around the door of one cabin “grew a Provence rose, then in blossom. Other families,” she adds, “brought with them and planted the locust. It was pleasant to see their old home loves, brought into connection with their new splendors” (SL, p. 39). Within the cabins thus adorned she looked for a scene in which “female taste had veiled every rudeness—availed itself of every sylvan grace” (SL, p. 58). Where such expectations were fulfilled—the sylvan home harmonizing with an unspoiled terrain—Fuller enjoyed days of “unalloyed, spotless happiness,” declaring herself, as Elizabeth House Trist never dared, “in Elysium” (SL, p. 46).

But such was not always, or even predominantly, her experience. She wanted to see settlement without despoliation. She wanted to see the stands of woodland along the prairie as “fair parks, and the little loghouses on the edge, with their curling smokes, harmoniz[ing] beautifully with them” (SL, p. 40). “Almost always when you came near,” however, that attractive vision evaporated and, in its place, “the slovenliness of the dwelling, and the rude way in which objects around it were treated” appeared “very repulsive” (SL, p. 46). “After seeing so many dwellings of the new settlers,” Fuller was reluctantly forced to conclude that, for the most part, the settlers did not—as she did—appreciate the natural beauty surrounding them, having “no thought beyond satisfying the grossest material wants” (SL, p. 46). And this, she foresees, bodes ill for the future: “their mode of cultivation will, in the course of twenty, perhaps ten years, obliterate the natural expression of the country” (SL, p. 47).

Having ventured west prepared to encounter “mushroom growth,” knowing “that where ‘go ahead’ is the only motto, the village cannot grow into the gentle proportions that successive lives, and the gradations of experience involuntarily give” (SL, p. 28), Fuller seems nonetheless to have been unprepared for her profound disappointment in “the raw, crude, staring assemblage of houses, everywhere … to be met in this country” (SL, p. 172). What she called “the natural expression of the country” had suggested other possibilities to her. “I know not when the mere local habitation has seemed to me to afford so fair a chance for happiness,” she wrote (SL, p. 59), believing herself to have found “the very Eden which earth might still afford to a pair willing to give up the hackneyed pleasures of the world, for a better and more intimate communion with one another and with beauty” (SL, p. 122). Having regained something of that paradise in her own wanderings, she could not easily let it go. And so, despite a growing distaste for much of what she saw, Fuller nonetheless stubbornly fixed her “attention almost exclusively on the picturesque beauty of this region” (SL, p. 104).

The results were in one sense “the poetic impression” she aimed at, in another, passages that read like excerpts from a promotional tract. Naively, and without any indication of the capital necessary to purchase and then run a farm until its crops could yield a profit, Fuller insisted that “with a very little money, a ducal estate may be purchased, and by a very little more, and moderate labor, a family be maintained upon it with raiment, food and shelter.” The privations of first settlement she altogether dismissed. “If the houses are imperfectly built, they can afford immense fires and plenty of covering; if they are small, who cares?—with such fields to roam in.” “With plenty of fish, game, and wheat,” she insisted, even displaced city-dwellers might easily “dispense with a baker to bring ‘muffins hot’ every morning to the door for their breakfast” (SL, p. 59).

If she could only ignore the sheer ugliness that greeted her worst apprehensions, she wanted to believe, she could secure her vision of a welcoming alternative to the rocky hillsides and impoverished farms of New England. From that rural poverty, which now produced only “a society of struggling men,” Margaret Fuller had eagerly embraced the west, hoping to locate there a stable and contented domesticity, with a truce to the age-old struggle between the human and the natural. For on the prairies, Fuller averred, nature “did not say, Fight or starve; nor even, Work or cease to exist; but, merely showing that the apple was a finer fruit than the wild crab, gave both room to grow in the garden” (SL, p. 60).

It was not only a refuge for her fellow New Englanders that Margaret Fuller clung to in this vision, however. Underpinning her social and economic concerns was a commitment to a personal refuge “where nature still wore her motherly smile” (SL, p. 60). The phrasing was not accidental. It pointed to childhood experiences she could not abandon and, consequently, to adult dreams she would not see obliterated. For, whether “travers[ing] the blooming plain” or “the fine, parklike woods,” Fuller “‘found … where fresh nature suffers no ravage’” “such country as I have never seen, even in my dreams, although those dreams had been haunted by wishes for just such an one” (SL, pp. 40, 51, 73, 36). Of course, she had seen such a country—or at least a version of it—in childhood, in her mother's garden in Cambridgeport. But less happy rural associations, coming in later years, had blurred the earlier image, leaving the young woman “haunted by wishes” for a terrain she could not clearly identify. In Illinois, at last, the intervening “years of dullness” were once and for all “redeemed,” as the bright days on the blooming prairies (SL, p. 36) restored to adult consciousness the palpable incarnation of a little girl's garden retreat.

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810, the descendant of two old and once-affluent New England families. Her father, Timothy Fuller, was a lawyer prominent in Massachusetts politics, several times elected to the state senate and to the Congress. Well educated, though idiosyncratic in his opinions, and an imperious, rarely affectionate man, Timothy Fuller took upon himself the early schooling of his eldest child. Almost as soon as young Margaret could speak, her father put her “under discipline of considerable severity” and began training her in the classics of antique Greece and Rome. “He was a severe teacher,” she was later to write, so much so that the daily regimen of reading and recitation that he demanded made of his daughter “a ‘youthful prodigy’ by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism.” When she sought escape from her father's study, she retreated to “the happiest haunt of my childish years,—our little garden, … which was my mother's delight.” There she could daydream as she pleased, gazing upon the flowers that her “mother's hand had planted” and delighting particularly in a creeping clematis vine: “How exquisitely happy I was in its beauty.” At age thirty, just three years before her summer in the midwest, she recalled “thankfully … what I owe to that garden, where the best hours of my lonely childhood were spent.”⁴

The debilitating effects of the intellectual discipline inculcated by her father in the young Margaret Fuller notwithstanding, precisely that discipline, and the enormous learning it engendered, later afforded the young woman entrance—on almost equal terms—into the (mostly male) intellectual circles in and around Cambridge and Harvard. Her geographical proximity to those circles had been enhanced by the family's move from Cambridgeport to the beautiful Dana mansion overlooking the college in 1826 and then, in 1832, removal to the pre-Revolutionary house built by Colonel Brattle in Cambridge. During this period, Fuller began what one biographer has called “a new and rich phase in her life,”⁵ but a phase abruptly curtailed with the reelection of Andrew Jackson. Timothy Fuller, having backed John Quincy Adams in the election of 1832, now saw his own political future extinguished. Disappointed and disillusioned, he decided to retire from public life and, in 1833, he moved his wife and eight children to his boyhood home on the Fuller family homestead in Groton, Massachusetts, some forty miles northwest of Boston.

Habitually passive in her relations with her husband and always in frail health, Fuller's mother quietly acquiesced in the move. Fuller, then twenty-three and reluctant to part with newfound friends, bitterly opposed it, even lingering in Cambridge for a few weeks after the rest of the family had left. In the end, however, she had no choice but to follow them to her father's chosen rural retreat (a place she already knew and disliked from its association with her earlier attendance at the Misses Prescott's School for Young Ladies in Groton). Despite the town's location on a daily stagecoach route to Boston, Fuller felt lonely and isolated on the Groton farm. Trying to make the best of it, she wrote bravely to a friend in the city, “I highly enjoy being surrounded with new and beautiful natural objects,” even insisting, in July, that “the evenings lately have been those of Paradise.”⁶ But not for long did rural Groton remain a paradise.

Upon her first arrival there, Fuller found her ten-year old brother, Arthur, feverish and in danger of losing an eye from a recent farm accident. The baby, Edward, soon sickened. Her mother was often ill, and her grandmother, who visited for extended periods, was also ailing. Under such circumstances, Margaret served as nursemaid to all who needed her, at the same time training and helping the single servant the family's now “narrowed income” permitted.⁷ She sewed, saw to the daily feeding of eight or nine people and, according to her most recent biographer, “spent five to eight hours a day tutoring her sister, her brothers Arthur and Richard, and three other children” besides.⁸ For all her efforts, however, she could not keep the family together. Economic strains and personal tensions drove the two older sons to leave home, and, for all her care, the youngest child finally died. “There,” in Groton, Fuller wrote bitterly to one of her brothers, “your mother's health was injured and mine destroyed.”⁹

A trip up the Hudson with friends from Boston proved only a brief respite. Upon her return, faced with the same crushing household drudgery, she fell seriously ill. Upon her recovery, in 1835, her father died suddenly of Asiatic cholera. “The Peterborough hills and the Wachusetts”—the hills over which the kitchen and parlor windows looked out—“are associated in my mind with many hours of anguish, as great, I think, as I am capable of feeling,” she wrote her brother.¹⁰ Timothy Fuller's dream of rural retreat had proven a disaster. And not until her trip to the middle western prairies, some eight years later, would his eldest child again be able to experience the power of such dreams as her own.

For what Fuller was able to repossess on the parklike and flowered prairies of the middle west was her unmediated pleasure in “the dear little garden” remembered from childhood. The back door of the Cambridge-port house had “opened on a high flight of steps, by which I went down to a green plot,” Fuller recalled. “This opened into a little garden, full of choice flowers and fruit-trees, which was my mother's delight, and was carefully kept. Here I felt at home.”¹¹ Her mother's garden had thus first awakened Fuller to the pleasure she would later take in “the beautiful prairie flowers” (SL, p. 33). So too it had given a hint of the expansiveness that would later delight her in Illinois and Wisconsin. At the far end of the Cambridgeport garden, “a gate opened thence into the fields” beyond. “This gate I used to open,” the adult recalled of the child, “to see the sunset heaven.”¹² On her first ride out onto the prairies from Chicago, Fuller encountered her childhood memories magnified many times over in the prairie flowers, all “in their glory the first ten days we were there,” and in “the sun set[ting] with that calmness only seen in the prairies” (SL, pp. 33, 34).

It was this capacity to take pleasure in flowers and sunset fields, however, that the two years in Groton had threatened to destroy. The rural paradise she had hoped for, but then irrevocably lost in Groton, at last seemed possible in her newfound prairie Eden. Little wonder that “years of dullness” seemed to her “redeemed.” And less wonder still that the prairies seemed to offer “such country as I had never seen, even in my dreams, although those dreams had been haunted by wishes for just such an one” (SL, p. 36).

In repossessing the pleasures of her childhood garden, moreover, Fuller also returned to the emotional center of that refuge: her mother. Timothy Fuller's imperious presence may have brooded over Groton, but onto the prairies Fuller projected “a scene where nature still wore her motherly smile” (SL, p. 60). What had made her feel at home in the Cambridgeport garden, after all, and what had forever after rendered the flowers of clematis creeper an “emblem of domestic love” for her was the presiding presence of the frail and lovely Margarett Crane Fuller, herself “one of those fair and flower-like natures.” As Fuller characterized her in an autobiographical memoir, her mother was “a creature … bound by one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds” and filled with “that spontaneous love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree, which restores the golden age.”¹³ If the language of the memoir transformed the woman into a kind of nature deity, the language Fuller later used to describe the prairie attempted, no less, to turn the landscape into a kind of mother bestowing “lavish love” (SL, p. 68).

In the poem of farewell she composed upon leaving Chicago, Fuller made explicit what she encountered in the fortnight's jaunt across De Kalb and Lee counties and, in that encounter, what she had experienced. “A tender blessing lingers o'er the scene,” she wrote of the prairie landscape—

Like some young mother's thought, fond, yet serene,
And through its life new-born our lives have been.

(SL, p. 68)

If the whole of the Illinois chapter of Summer on the Lakes generally hints at adult reversion to childhood raptures and “fairy-land exultation” (SL, p. 34), these lines point to the particular raptures of psychic rebirth through the mother. In Illinois, these lines suggest, the adult woman repossessed the maternal garden of childhood refuge and, in that process, healed the trauma of the rural nightmare imposed by her father's retirement to Groton.

Perhaps because she was so eager to recapture the garden of her childhood, and perhaps because she needed emotionally to restore the marred “Paradise” of Groton through the newfound “Elysium” of the prairies, the habitually tough-minded Fuller allowed herself to overlook contradictions and inconsistencies. For example, were entire families to remain on the prairies—especially on the same homestead—generation after generation, as she suggested, the press of ever increasing population density (augmented by American-born emigrants and foreign immigrants alike) would mean that, soon enough, as in New England, the western farmer, too, would be able to take only “a small slice from the landscape.” And none could then afford to leave any of it “wild,” as she had hoped (SL, pp. 59-60). Indeed, the very premise of her frontier “ducal estate” was sheer fantasy—albeit a fantasy promoted on frontier after frontier in America. “With a very little money,” little good land remained to be purchased in the areas she visited; and without capital to secure the necessary equipment, seed, and labor to make a go of it, and without ready cash to support a family until the land itself could support them, even “raiment, food, and shelter” became luxuries (SL, p. 59). Like Holley in Texas, so too, Fuller in Illinois seemed unwilling to acknowledge hardship or poverty on “the blooming plain” (SL, p. 30)—even though, to her credit, Fuller accurately observed that many an emigrant, “amid the abundance of nature,” could not, “from petty, but insuperable obstacles, procure, for a long time, comforts, or a home” (SL, p. 121).

But there was one challenge to her image of happy families on a prairie Eden that she could not overlook—because it called into question the very heart of her fantasy. Echoing the views of an earlier century, Fuller believed that the women settlers were “to render Home a Paradise,”¹⁴ by “veil[ing] every rudeness” and exhibiting within their homes “every sylvan grace” (SL, p. 58). At the same time, however, echoing the prairie promotionalists of her own era, Fuller also believed that women settlers were to find a home—and, as she had, a welcoming garden—in the prairie paradise. And herein, she came to discover, lay the frustrating contradiction in her fantasy. The frontier cabins, more often than not, were slovenly and repulsive to her, and the women within them revealed again and again their “unfitness … for their new lot” (SL, p. 61). In short, the experiences of the women settlers she met recapitulated no Edenic return; what they recapitulated was her own horrific residence at Groton.

Few of the women, she learned, had welcomed the move westward. That had “generally been the choice of the men, and the women follow, as women will, doing their best for affection's sake, but too often in heartsickness and weariness” (SL, p. 61). It was a species of suffering Fuller and her mother knew all too well. With a recognition that comes of shared experience only, Fuller immediately understood that because it was not for these women “a choice or conviction of their own minds that it is best to be here, their part is the hardest” (SL, p. 61). Even more appalling, along with the Provence rose or the locust tree of “old home loves” (SL, p. 39), these women had also transported with them “the necessary routine of small arrangements”—in other words, the exacting details of housekeeping, all of it exacerbated by the conditions of a frontier. Again, as though recalling her own gradual collapse in Groton under analogous demands, Fuller observed that the western woman “can rarely find any aid in domestic labor. All its various and careful tasks must often be performed, sick, or well, by the mother and daughters, to whom a city education has imparted neither the strength nor skill now demanded.” “The wives of the poorer settlers,” she added, “having more hard work to do than before, very frequently become slatterns; but the ladies, accustomed to a refined neatness, feel that they cannot degrade themselves by its absence” and so, often to the destruction of their health, keep up the “struggle under every disadvantage” (SL, p. 61).

In defending her vision of a frontier “ducal estate” against the lure of “the luxurious and minute comforts of a city life,” Fuller had argued that if the cabins were “imperfectly built” or “small, who cares?—with such fields to roam in” (SL, p. 59). What she thought she was offering among those “fields,” and “‘amid those bowers of wild-wood, those dream-like, bee-sung, murmuring and musical plains,’” of course, were what one of her correspondents (quoted in Summer on the Lakes) called “‘the imaginative, yet thoughtful surfaces’” of her own fantasied maternal garden (SL, p. 73). All who came, she hoped, would respond as she had; all would discover, as had a fellow New Englander, that, on the prairies, “‘the solitudes are not savage; … they never repel; there are no lonely heights, no isolated spots, but all is gentle, mild, inviting,—all is accessible’” (SL, p. 75). In fact, for herself, a summer's tourist, Fuller discovered that it was all accessible. But among the new settlers, she learned, it was accessible to the men only. The women were housebound, both by necessity and by training. “The men,” she wrote, “can find assistance in field labor, and recreation with the gun and fishing-rod. Their bodily strength is greater, and enables them to bear and enjoy both these forms of life.” The women, by contrast, lack both the time for leisure (since they cannot find “aid in domestic labor”) and the “resources for pleasure”: “When they can leave the housework, they have not learnt to ride, to drive, to row, alone” (SL, pp. 61-62).

In a year when thousands of Americans eagerly devoured The Lost Sister of Wyoming (1842), the story of Frances Slocum's captivity and sixty-year sojourn among the Delaware Indians,¹⁵ Margaret Fuller—all unwittingly—was composing yet another version of the oldest of American narrative forms. The women she met in Illinois and Wisconsin, as she made clear, had by and large, like the captivity heroine, been taken there against their will. But, in Fuller's text, no longer did the Indian stand in as symbolic substitute for the perpetrator of the deed and no longer did the landscape figure as a “howling Wilderness” emblematic of captivity.¹⁶ The landscape, in fact, figured as an appealing and promised garden. And the frontier home—once the place of refuge—now stood as the place of imprisonment, with the small, dark, often windowless cabins isolating women from the fields without. Probably without realizing what she was about, Fuller thus managed to lay bare the emotional structures of the traditional captivity design where she had hoped to delineate her fantasy of “the very Eden which earth might still afford” (SL, p. 122).

It was a pattern she described first in her chapters on Illinois, and then she repeated it in her account of the carriage tour across the Wisconsin Territory. When her carriage broke down outside of Milwaukee, for example, Fuller reports that she “took refuge” in a farmhouse that at first promised to fulfill the fantasy: “Here was a pleasant scene. A rich and beautiful estate, several happy families, who had removed together, and formed a natural community, ready to help and enliven one another. They were farmers at home, in Western New York, and both men and women knew how to work.” “Yet even here,” she cautions in the very next sentence, “the women did not like the change.” Even so, like so many others she met, they had been “willing ‘as it might be best for the young folks’” (SL, pp. 124-25). Only once—again in Wisconsin—did Fuller report meeting “a contented woman, the only one I heard of out there. She was English, and said she had seen so much suffering in her own country that the hardships of this seemed as nothing to her.” “But the others,” Fuller had to admit, “found their labors disproportioned to their strength, if not to their patience” (SL, pp. 116-17). The recurrence forced Fuller to repeat her disheartening discovery that the garden was available to men only: “while their husbands and brothers enjoyed the country in hunting or fishing, [the women] found themselves confined to a comfortless and laborious indoor life” (SL, p. 117).

The problem, as she saw it, was two-fold: women had not the leisure to enjoy the prairie garden because of their burdensome domestic responsibilities; but even where leisure might be found, the city-bred women, especially, did not know how to enjoy the new landscape. “Their culture,” Fuller commented ruefully, “has too generally been that given to women to make them ‘the ornaments of society.’ They can dance, but not draw; talk French, but know nothing of the language of flowers; neither in childhood were allowed to cultivate them, lest they should tan their complexions. Accustomed to the pavement of Broadway, they dare not tread the wildwood paths for fear of rattlesnakes!” Her most immediate response to the ensuing “joylessness, and inaptitude, both of body and mind” that she everywhere witnessed in these women, therefore, was to attack the fashionable patterns of eastern education that had so ill-fitted them for their new life (SL, p. 62). In this, she anticipated Eliza Farnham, whose Life in Prairie Land (published two years after Summer on the Lakes) similarly and repeatedly castigated “‘the empty and worthless character of our plans of female education at the east’” as “‘unfit[ting] females for everything like a natural or useful life.’”¹⁷

But where Farnham was content to attribute all the ills of western women to the deficiencies of (generally eastern) education, Fuller was not. Though she never stated it explicitly, she nonetheless seems to have grasped that even improved educational programs would not necessarily lead women out onto “the wildwood paths” if their domestic duties continued to confine them “to a comfortless and laborious indoor life” (SL, pp. 62, 177). As a result, in the process of turning the notes in her journal into the book-length record of her travels in the west, she attempted, in a way Farnham never would, to understand why the promised garden, now palpably available, as she herself had seen it in Illinois and Wisconsin, continued to remain the exclusive domain of men.

Her analysis was complicated by the fact that, in part, she was dealing with her own unacknowledged psychic needs and, in part, with the realities of other women's lives, insofar as they had revealed themselves to her. And the two—that is, her fantasy and the reality these women reported—were deeply in conflict. Without any available psychoanalytic paradigm to get at the fact that she was essentially trying to salvage a personal fantasy as public property, protecting herself thereby from the specter of its frustration, Fuller employed instead a vocabulary of “dreams” (SL, p. 36) and “poetry” (SL, p. 28) and a narrative structure that most readers have found digressive and full of apparent irrelevancies. So certain was Arthur Buckminster Fuller of the essentially “episodical nature of the work,” for instance, that, when he edited Summer on the Lakes for reissue in 1856, he boasted of making “omissions” in the text “without in any way marring its unity.” The reader, he felt confident, would not miss his sister's interpolated “extracts from books which she read in relation to the Indians; an account of and translation from the Seeress of Prevorst, a German work … ; a few extracts from letters and poems sent to her by friends while she was in the West … ; and the story of Marianne.”¹⁸ He was no doubt right. Still, in reducing the text mainly to Fuller's original observations of the west, he eliminated many sections—especially the Seeress of Prevorst and Mariana stories—in and through which his sister sought “to woo the mighty meaning of the scene” and evoke “a new order, a new poetry” from the confused “chaos” of her own responses (SL, p. 28).

To be sure, the stories of Mariana and the Seeress of Prevorst, having no obvious relation to western travel, do not immediately identify themselves as integral to the text. But, in fact, they served Fuller as crucial thematic glosses on her larger understanding of the position of women on the frontier. The Seeress of Prevorst, an uneducated German peasant with apparently unusually developed psychic powers, may at first have fascinated Fuller because her story seemed to suggest the interpenetration of this world by other-world, or spiritual, beings. And Fuller, like Farnham, strongly suggests that she, too, has experienced almost religious raptures, perhaps even spiritual elevations (or rebirth) on the prairies. Eventually, though, the Seeress of Prevorst comes to stand not for the woman of unusual power but for the woman powerless to be understood, or even to survive with her gifts, in the world as it is. Given up as mad by family and friends, and abused by improper medical treatment, the seeress (or mystic) finds a sympathetic and believing friend in a doctor who attends her during her last few years, and she dies young.

So, too, does Mariana, although the ostensible cause is different: Mariana dies of a broken heart because Sylvain, her husband, can neither appreciate her mind and spirit, nor love as ardently as she. “Such women as Mariana are often lost,” Fuller ends the story, “unless they meet some man of sufficiently great soul to prize them” (SL, p. 102). Mariana's story is introduced when Fuller claims to meet, in Chicago, “Mrs. Z., the aunt of an old schoolmate” (SL, p. 81). The conversation with the aunt precipitates the narrative, the first part of which follows Mariana through school. A number of Fuller scholars have detected autobiographical elements in this section of the story (Mariana, for example, is “a sleep-walker” [SL, p. 83], as Fuller said she had been as a child); and the story of Mariana's schooldays is often taken as a barely fictionalized version of Fuller's own experience at the Misses Prescott's school.¹⁹ Certainly, some temperamental affinities suggest the author's identification with her creation. Fuller, who in 1841 passionately exclaimed, “I must die if I do not burst forth in genius or heroism,”²⁰ described a Mariana possessed of “a mind whose large impulses are disproportioned to the persons and occasions she meets, and which carry her beyond those reserves which mark the appointed lot of women” (SL, p. 103).

A similar disproportion, of course, might also be attributed to the Seeress of Prevorst. And, as well, to the women whom Fuller encountered on the Illinois and Wisconsin frontiers. Indeed, that was precisely the term Fuller used when, a few pages later, she bewailed the fate of frontier women who “found their labors disproportioned to their strength” (SL, p. 117). What was significant in these stories, in effect, was not whether the women possessed capacities too large for their situation—as with the German mystic or Mariana—or found their capacities inadequate. The link at which Fuller aimed was the disproportion itself, the poor fit between individual ability and social role.

The final chapters of Summer on the Lakes deal largely with Fuller's observations of the Indians on Mackinaw Island. A sympathetic portrait of a once proud, but now deteriorating people, forced off their original homelands and thereby deprived of meaningful roles within coherent social structures, these chapters repeat thematic currents from the earlier descriptions of frontier women. It is not, however, a connection that Fuller herself ever makes. And her brother, in commending her “impressions respecting that much injured and fast vanishing race” in his preface to the 1856 edition of Summer on the Lakes, also pointedly ignored the connection. For him, the ruminations from Mackinaw Island offered “additional proof” of his sister's “sympathy with all the oppressed”—which, for Arthur Buckminster Fuller, meant essentially “the Indian or the African.”²¹ His sister recognized sexual oppression as well. If she chose not to directly link the sorry situation of the Indian in general with that of the frontierswoman, she nonetheless drew from her observations of Indian women in particular a further understanding of their white sisters. Following upon an extended discussion of the social status of Indian women, including lengthy excerpts from the works of others who had written about them, Fuller came full circle, returning to the problem of woman universally “disproportioned to the persons and occasions she meets” (SL, p. 103). “Has the Indian [woman], has the white woman,” she asked, “as noble a feeling of life and its uses, as religious a self-respect, as worthy a field of thought and action, as man? If not, the white woman, the Indian woman, occupies an inferior position to that of man” (SL, p. 182).

Riding “through fields, and dells, and stately knolls, of most idyllic beauty” (SL, p. 114), Fuller had experienced an enrichment of her being. The prairie responded to her deepest needs, gave her back some part of herself; and on its flowered expanse she had “looked on that which matches with [my] mood, / Impassioned sweetness of full being's flood” (SL, p. 68). It became for her, in short, an idealized “field of thought and action” (SL, p. 182), a fantasy realm that seemed to respond to her capacities, and, as a result, a place that promised to erase the “disproportion” that had marked her own life. What threatened to destroy the fantasy was the specter of other women debarred from that same flowered field and attentive instead only to “the necessary routine of small arrangements” (SL, p. 61).

“It is not so much a question of power” (in the sense of inherent talent or natural ability), she came to understand. Women like herself, like the Seeress of Prevorst, like Mariana, like the frontier settlers she had met—all had powers, or abilities, to “carry [them] beyond those reserves which mark the appointed lot of women” (SL, p. 103). The “disproportion” they suffered in their lives, and which threatened always to destroy them, lay in the discrepancy between their potential power for thought and action and the actual “field of thought and action” permitted them. But it was only by means of pursuing the Indian woman's status that Fuller came, albeit circuitously, to an understanding of the white woman's as well. The inadequacy of the white woman's education to prepare her for life in the frontier west, she realized, was a symptom—a telling symptom; but it was not the root cause of the problem. “It is not so much a question of power,” she understood at last, “as of privilege” (SL, p. 182). And with that statement she pointed her finger at male privilege.

By custom, law, and training, the privilege of the garden belonged to those who determined who was to live on what landscape and how they were to live there. Having “never sympathized” with her father's “liking for [the Groton] farm” (as she admitted in a letter after his death),²² but having been forced nonetheless to live there, Fuller well understood who, in the nineteenth century, made such determinations. In Summer on the Lakes she never said this directly, of course. But she did acknowledge that the men who dreamed themselves Daniel Boone easily enough left behind home and hearth to hunt and fish alone amid the woods and streams, while the women, carrying with them some version of her own “emblem of domestic love” (SL, p. 42), the remembered garden, found instead “a comfortless and laborious indoor life” (SL, p. 117). Indeed, a gradual movement toward attaining these insights both structures and explains her insertion of materials otherwise irrelevant to a book of personal observations about the west. The apparent digressions, the interpolated stories, and the lengthy quotations from other writers, in other words, were all part of a larger narrative process in and through which Fuller sought a clearer picture of what she called “the defect in the position of woman” (SL, p. 102).

Such probings were not new to Margaret Fuller. The July 1843 issue of the Dial, which had gone to press just before she embarked for the Great Lakes, carried her feminist essay, “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women.” What her tour of Illinois and Wisconsin did was to confront her, ever more urgently, with the need for more of such probings. It was not just isolated women like herself and her mother who had followed an imperious male to a rural domestic nightmare. Whole generations of women going west were now following, “as women will, doing their best for affection's sake, but too often in heartsickness and weariness” (SL, p. 61). And what now made that “heartsickness and weariness” insupportable was that it occurred where fantasy dictated it need not, in the newfound garden, where “the mere local habitation … seemed … to afford so fair a chance of happiness” (SL, p. 59).

In a sense, then, the process of struggling to put into book form the “chaos” of impressions that comprised her journal notes,²³ struggling, in effect, to “woo the mighty meaning of the scene,” prepared Fuller for the work upon which, to this day, her reputation still rests. The questions first raised in the Dial essay, the questions to which Summer on the Lakes drove her once again, she began more cogently to answer in her next book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. “Not only the Indian squaw carries the burdens of the camp,” she wrote there, echoing the observations she had made on the prairie; so, too, “the washerwoman stands at her tub, and carries home her work at all seasons, and in all states of health.” Most vividly in her years at Groton and then again on the prairies, she had witnessed women “go through their killing labors.”²⁴ As a result, it was to the two great themes of privilege and the “worthy … field of thought and action” (SL, p. 182) that Woman in the Nineteenth Century repeatedly returned.

“I think women need, especially, at this juncture,” she pleaded, “a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers.” The example she then offered in Woman in the Nineteenth Century suggests how indelibly the fate of the women on the frontier had impressed itself upon her: “A party of travellers lately visited a lonely hut on a mountain. There they found an old woman, who told them she and her husband had lived there forty years. ‘Why,’ they said, ‘did you choose so barren a spot?’ She ‘did not know; it was the man's notion.’” The woman in the mountain hut recapitulates the women in the cabins along the prairie frontier, taken—because a man had chosen it—to a place that proves, both physically and symbolically, a barren spot. “And, during forty years,” Fuller laments, “she had been content to act, without knowing why, upon ‘the man's notion.’ I would not have it so.”²⁵

In this context, Summer on the Lakes is no more a simple response to Charles Dickens's notorious caricature of western manners in American Notes (1842) than Woman in the Nineteenth Century is simply an expansion of the July 1843 Dial essay. Summer on the Lakes is everywhere informed, not by a desire to answer Dickens, as some critics have suggested,²⁶ but by the concerns for women that Fuller had so recently explored in “The Great Lawsuit” essay; and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in its turn, was informed by the new insights (and the frustrated fantasies) awakened on the prairies but only imperfectly analyzed in Summer on the Lakes.²⁷

Despite the “complimentary notices in the papers,” of which she boasted in a letter to a friend,²⁸ Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes earned its author nothing “but copies to give away.”²⁹ It went through one edition only in 1844, selling at most seven hundred copies.³⁰ Subsequent to Fuller's death in 1850, her friends organized to reissue her works as part of a memorial to her. But by then it was the general consensus that the many so-called digressions “weighed the book down too heavily for success.”³¹ In consequence, as noted earlier, her brother, Arthur Buckminster Fuller, removed large sections and issued an abridged edition in 1856. This abridged version was then reprinted in 1860, in 1869, and yet again in 1874, in the six-volume Collected Works that Fuller's brother also edited. Never, however, did it gain either the stature of her Woman in the Nineteenth Century or the recognition accorded more popular women's books about the west.

Thus, for women readers seeking from women writers some notion of what the prairie frontier might hold for them, there remained—with the single and singular exception of Caroline Kirkland—the better-known promotional tracts promising one form or another of the Edenic domestic fantasy. In works like Mary Austin Holley's Texas and Eliza W. Farnham's Life in Prairie Land, the flowered garden of the prairie beckoned, apparently offering easy prosperity, familial security, genial climate, and physical freedoms for women unheard of in the east. What had begun to happen is clear. With the advance onto the well-watered, tree-lined, and rolling prairies of Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Texas, during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the American landscape became for women what it had always been for men—a realm for the projection of gratifying fantasies. But just as the realities of actual settlement had so often thwarted the fantasies of men, converting an inviting feminine terrain into the specter of violated maternity and ravaged virginity, so too now—as Margaret Fuller began to perceive—the demands of frontier life also thwarted the fantasies of women.

The prairies might indeed be beautiful and welcoming in their appearance, with flowered meadows bespeaking “the very Eden which earth might still afford” (SL, p. 122). But the landscape, as most women too late discovered, was not their domain of action. For them, the new home constituted not any flowering garden but only a rude cabin, sometimes without even windows from which to gaze out on the surrounding beauty. Eliza Farnham would hint at the contradiction, taking out her anger on the female education that had so ill prepared women for their role in the west. Fuller both reported the contradiction and then anticipated Farnham in similarly castigating eastern fashions of education. But Fuller went beyond Farnham, suggesting that it was precisely woman's exclusively domestic role, and her insulation from the privilege to effect any change in that role, which was destroying her chances for realizing the fantasy. Fuller, however, unlike Farnham, was not widely read. Initially misunderstood and quickly forgotten after its first small printing, her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 finally did little to persuade an eagerly westering nation that, where women were concerned, their newfound frontier fantasies might, in fact, turn into domestic captivity—even in Eden.

Notes

1. See Rebecca Smith Lee, Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), p. 254; and Mary Austin Holley, The Texas Diary, 1835-1838, ed. James P. Bryan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 43.

2. S. M. Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown; New York: Charles S. Francis and Co., 1844), p. 67.

3. Eliza W. Farnham, Life in Prairie Land (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846), p. 408.

4. Margaret Fuller, “On her childhood [1840],” in Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976), pp. 37, 41-42.

5. Paula Blanchard, Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), p. 54.

6. Margaret Fuller, Groton, Massachusetts, to Frederick Henry Hedge, Boston, July 4, 1833, quoted in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1890; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 43, 44.

7. See Higginson, p. 60.

8. Blanchard, p. 76.

9. Quoted in Higginson, pp. 59-60.

10. Ibid., p. 60.

11. Fuller, “On her childhood [1840],” in Chevigny, p. 42.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., pp. 42, 36.

14. Diary of Mrs. Eliza [Carolina Burgwin] Clitherall (1784-1863), Typed Vol. I: MSS vol. 3, typed p. 14, in Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill.

15. John Todd, The Lost Sister of Wyoming. An Authentic Narrative (Northampton, Mass.: J. H. Butler, 1842).

16. See, for example, Mary Rowlandson, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, A Minister's Wife in New-England (London: Joseph Poole, 1682), p. 10.

17. Farnham, p. 353.

18. Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Summer on the Lakes, ed. Arthur B. Fuller, 2d ed. (1856; reprint, New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970), p. ix.

19. See Higginson, pp. 198-99.

20. Quoted in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 279.

21. Ossoli, Summer on the Lakes, ed. Fuller, p. v.

22. Quoted in Blanchard, p. 93.

23. See Higginson, pp. 194-95.

24. Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Women, ed. Arthur B. Fuller (1855; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 34-35. This statement first appeared, in somewhat altered form, in Margaret Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” Dial 4, no. 1 (July 1843): 12.

25. Ossoli, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 174.

26. See, for example, Chevigny, p. 316.

27. My remarks here largely complement Chevigny's observation, p. 215, that Woman in the Nineteenth Century “represented two sorts of advances in [Fuller's] development: a quickened sense of independence and of psychological integrity and a new attention to the claims of society and politics” (my emphasis).

28. Quoted in Higginson, p. 198.

29. This is Higginson's assessment, p. 199.

30. See Higginson, p. 200.

31. Higginson expresses this view, p. 197.