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Transcendental Women Episode | Open Source Radio

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Transcendental Women


Transcendental Women

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DATE : Tue, 11 Jul 2006 19:00:00 +0500
Entered in Database : 2006-07-11 14:00:00
length : 24921456
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I was amazed--it sounds so innocent and silly--to find that most of American Literature was written in three houses over a period of five years.
Susan Cheever
hawthorne_grave

At Sleepy Hollow Cemetary [redjar / Flickr]

The handsomest author and the most adoring wife in the annals of American literature are together again. You may have heard the news that the remains of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (whose diamond-etched love lyrics are still readable in the window panes of Ralph Waldo Emerson's family Manse in Concord, Massachusetts) have finally been returned from England and re-interred alongside the immortal Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery down the road. But the real story might have been headlined: Sex among the Sages! And it would have dwelt on the feminist mystique and feminine intrigues that thrived among those Unitarian wisemen of Concord: in the network of Margaret Fuller, the Peabody Sisters -- Sophia, Elizabeth and Mary, who married Horace Mann, the father of public schooling in America; also Lydian Emerson and a little later Louisa May Alcott.
window_etching

Sophia's etchings in an Old Manse window pane: "Man's accidents are God's purposes" [Courtesy of Bonnie McGrath]

We will pick up the drama with Megan Marshall, whose account of the brilliant Peabody Sisters was nominated last year for a Pulitzer; and with Susan Cheever, whose forthcoming American Bloomsbury brings an intense and sometimes speculative imagination to rounding out the triangles here, and many other mysterious oblique angles. It was well known that Henry David Thoreau had an attachment to the sometimes depressive Lydian Emerson. And that Margaret Fuller had designs on Emerson, with whom she edited a sort of group-blog, The Dial magazine. It's Susan Cheever's version that Emerson, the landlord, threw Hawthorne out of The Manse for his for his overzealous interest in Margaret Fuller, who may well have been a model for The Scarlet Letter's Hester Prynne. Louisa May Alcott thickens the plot what she thought was her best book: Moods about a woman in love with an earth god like Thoreau and a sky god like Emerson -- a woman who dies in a fictional shipwreck, as Margaret Fuller did in a real one. What we knew about the Transcendentalists -- like Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott and their circle -- was that they were men who, before and after Margaret Fuller's appearance, never met a woman they could really talk with. But the women were talking with and about each other. Are we ready to deal with what they were saying?

Megan Marshall

Author, The Peabody Sisters

Susan Cheever

Author of the forthcoming American Bloomsbury
Extra Credit Reading
Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters, Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Becca, Historical Ruminations, Not Quite Sure, April 9, 2006. [Sarah] Margaret Fuller, American Transcendentalism Web. Orestes Brownson, Miss Fuller and Reformers, Brownson's Quarterly Review, April 1845. Jone Johnson Lewis, Transcendentalist Women: Harriet Martineau, the Peabody sisters, and Julia Ward Howe, About.com. CBC Arts, Hawthorne family reunited in Massachusetts cemetery, June 27, 2006. Wikipedia, Transcendentalism.

18:00

During the first year [at the Old Manse] Sophia became pregnant and had a miscarriage, and she took the diamond in her wedding ring and inscribed in the window “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes”. This was their way of coming to terms with a very sad loss. The second inscription came later. She became pregnant again, and that was to be their daughter Una, named after the character in the Fairy Queen. She inscribed Una’s birthday in that window. So it was a loss, and then a paradise regained.

Megan Marshall

28:25

I think that what happened was that as Hawthorne’s friendship with Margaret Fuller heated up, and Margaret Fuller was staying at the Emerson’s in a guest room on the ground floor… Emerson got more and more irritated that his house-guest was always haring over to the Hawthornes… There is one scene where Margaret Fuller and Hawthorne are lying in the grass in the afternoon and Emerson stumbles upon them. Soon after, the Hawthornes are asked to leave the Old Manse in October. And both Hawthorne and Sophia feel very exiled.

Megan Marshall

30:05

[Hawthorne] was told that Reverend Ripley, who lived in Waltham, wanted the house back… I think he felt that Emerson just got sick of having Hawthorne around when Margaret Fuller was a guest at the Emersons.

Susan Cheever

31:55

[Emerson] paid for everything, that was how [he] attracted a lot of these people… he paid the Alcott’s rent, he arranged for the Hawthornes to have the Old Manse rent-free… Emerson had not a huge amount of money, but more money than they did, money he’d gotten from suing the family of his dead wife. He had the resources, and he used them to gather people in Concord.

Susan Cheever

36:00

It’s so interesting that Brook Farm, or Bronson Alcott’s community Fruitlands, which were arranged to be clusters of geniuses, [didn’t] work, whereas Emerson, or Concord, or the conjunction of the two rivers made this happen in a place where it wasn’t so strictly planned.

Susan Cheever

41:00

As soon as politics descended on this community, the community just came apart.

Susan Cheever

43:25

I found an amazing thing; Hawthorne had volunteered to hold one of the first anti-slavery rallies in Concord while they were newlyweds at the Old Manse. Emerson was going to speak, Thoreau arranged it, but it rained, and so instead they held this meeting indoors in the town-house. I keep thinking, what would have happened if Emerson delivered his first important anti-slavery speech from the steps of the Old Manse at the invitation of Hawthorne and organized by Thoreau? It would have changed history.

Megan Marshall

45:50

There were two strands of Transcendentalism. The one we remember most is the being alone in nature, the self-reliance that Emerson wrote about, but there was also one originated by Elizabeth Peabody, the idea of the Social Principle, that we’re all born with an innate responsibility to others around us.

Megan Marshall


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