# "Woman [and] Artist": Margaret Fuller on Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Friendship

Alice de Galzain

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Alice de Galzain. "Woman [and] Artist": Margaret Fuller on Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Friendship. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2025, 35, pp.285 - 303. 10.1080/10436928.2024.2419813. hal-04927923

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# “Woman [and] Artist”: Margaret Fuller on Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Friendship

Alice de Galzain

**To cite this article:** Alice de Galzain (2024) "Woman [and] Artist": Margaret Fuller on Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Friendship, *Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory*, 35:4, 285-303, DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2024.2419813

**To link to this article:** https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2024.2419813

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# "Woman [and] Artist": Margaret Fuller on Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Friendship

Alice de Galzain

Conversation was a fundamental aspect of Margaret Fuller's career. Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin "convertere" to turn around, which perfectly encapsulates the life of a thinker whose work contributed to inspire, among others, the rise of the Women's Rights movement in the United States. Described by Ralph Waldo Emerson as the best conversationalist in America in the posthumous biography *Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli* (1852), Fuller excelled at this oratory art, which defined both her intimate relationships and her career. Her Boston Conversations, a series of discussions primarily for women that she held between 1839 and 1844, allowed her to engage critically with topics such as "Greek mythology," "Ethics," and "Woman"—Fuller and her women students actually exposed "the concept of woman's 'sphere' as a cultural construction" (Simmons 196), while remaining within the confines of what was considered acceptable for women. Compared with the more "masculine" lecture, conversation held quite an ambivalent status in Fuller's time: as David Randall explains in *The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation*, over the years, conversation gradually went from being a widely respected intellectual form of expression to being denigratingly associated with what was then referred to as "women's sphere." So although, as a woman, Fuller was constrained within the boundaries of "feminine" forms of expression, as an artist, she was able to subvert these boundaries by turning her Conversations into a feminist enterprise.¹

Conversation is also a term that characterizes the communities to which Fuller belonged and in which she revolved, for, as Charlene Avallone points out, "Fuller's discussion of 'woman' entered a dialogue in progress" (337). One of the communities in which Fuller took great interest, perhaps more than any other Transcendentalist, was the one of German Romantics. A major propo-nent of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at a time when he was under regular attack in America, Fuller translated his *Torquato Tasso* (shortening the title to *Tasso*) sometime around 1833. Unlike her translation of Johann Peter von Eckermann's *Conversations with Goethe*, which appeared in 1839, Fuller's *Tasso* was never published in her lifetime except for a few passages that were included in an 1842 *Dial* review of a book entitled, "Conjectures and Researches concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso." In the same issue of the *Dial*, Fuller also included a partial translation
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of Bettine Brentano-von Arnim’s second epistolary novel *Die Günderode* (1840),² which related her relationship with the poetess Karoline von Günderode.³ It is on that specific work that this essay focuses, aiming to examine Fuller’s rendering of the “friendship” between these women intellec- tuals by analyzing her article/translation, “Bettine Brentano and Her Friend Günderode” (1842). This essay shall compare Fuller’s account of the Brentano- Günderode relationship with Emerson’s depiction of Fuller in *Memoirs*, focus- ing specifically on a section entitled “Woman, or Artist?” in order to show how Fuller’s gendered commentary allowed her to resolve the constraining nine- teenth-century dichotomy that weighed on all women writers at the time. Fuller’s idealization of the friendship between the two women, I argue, is a celebration of the transcending power of “life” (intended both as sexual and artistic “reproduction”), and the way in which she constructs the “interior of German life” around them is a crucial early expression of both her Transcendentalism and her feminism.

Translation was, in itself, an act of feminist agency: as noted by Christina Zwarg, “It is telling that most of her published translations were from German, the one language she taught herself” (61). For Fuller, learning European languages by herself was an accomplishment that compensated for the fact that, until 36 years old, she had never been to Europe—about that, she wrote, “Italian, as well as German, I learned by myself, unassisted, except as to the pronunciation. I have never been brought into connection with minds trained to any severity in these kinds of elegant culture. I have used all the means within my reach, but my not going abroad is an insuperable defect in the technical part of my education” (*Memoirs* 1: 241). In *Feminist Conversations*, Zwarg establishes a clear link between translation and gender: Fuller, she writes, “underst[ood] that gender itself depended on a collision of languages, which is another way of saying that a determinate part of our experience imitates the array of divisions issuing from translation” (60). In her article on “Goethe,” published in the *Dial* in July 1841, Fuller reflected on her choice to translate a few excerpts of Goethe’s *Iphigenia* (1779) noting that “[l]ike all pure productions of genius, this may be injured by the slightest change, and I dare not flatter myself that the English words give an idea of the heroic dignity expressed in the cadence of the original” (39). Fuller’s caution as a translator is palpable, and her meta-commentary shows the real breadth of her commit- ment as a vector of German literature. Karen English calls Fuller a “cultural mediator” for her “interest in Latin, French, German, and Italian went beyond the scholarly acquisition of language or the academic study of literature; she wanted to act as ... promoter, of various cultures to a circle of private friends and subsequently for her public readers” (145). In her review of *Die Günderode*, Fuller’s role of “cultural mediator” positions her at the intersection of gender, nationality, and age—“I have followed as much as possible the idiom of the writer as well as her truly girlish punctuation. Commas and
dashes are the only stops natural to girls; their sentences flow on in little minim ripples, unbroken as the brook in a green field unless by some slight waterfall or jet of Ohs and Ahs” (“Brentano” 325). In this passage, Fuller does not linger on the linguistic challenges of bringing a German text to an American audience; instead, she celebrates the “girlish” style of Brentano’s exchanges, which she views as the mark of their uniqueness, as well as the young age of its authors (“girls”), which in turn becomes responsible for charming stylistic features (“their sentences flow on in little minim ripples”).

After writing two articles on Goethe,⁴ which both appeared in the *Dial* —“Menzel’s View of Goethe by Margaret Fuller” in January 1841 and “Goethe,” which Emerson deemed “on many accounts, her best paper” (*Memoirs* 1: 244)—Fuller turned to Brentano-von Arnim, a figure very close to the German thinker. Author of *Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child* (1835),⁵ which Fuller described as “genuine transcripts of private experience” (“Brentano” 317), Bettine was, in fact, an intimate friend of the famous writer. As Fuller recounted, “Bettine, belonging to a large and wealthy family of extensive commercial connexions, and seeing at the house of grandmother Me. La Roche, most of the distinguished literati of the time, as well as those noble and princely persons who were proud to do honor to letters, if they did not professedly cultivate them, brings before us a much wider circle” (“Brentano” 318). Bettine was the sister of Romantic writer Clemens Brentano, the wife of Achim von Arnim, also famous for his poetry and novel writing, and the granddaughter of the pre-Romantic popular novelist, Sophie von La Roche. Bettine’s mother, Maximiliane, and Goethe had been friends—however, the friendship ended abruptly and 35 years later her daughter took her place (“Bettina von Arnim”). Brentano “idolized Goethe (who was 57 when she first met him); she had frequently visited Goethe’s mother in Frankfurt and recorded tales of the poet’s childhood” (“Bettina von Arnim”).

To *Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child*, Fuller, however, preferred von Arnim’s *Die Günderode* published five years later. In a journal entry written in February 1841, she explained, “I meant to have translated the best passages of ‘Die Günderode,’—which I prefer to Bettine’s correspondence with Goethe. The two girls are equal natures, and both in earnest” (*Memoirs* 2: 58). Fuller perceived a sense of balance between the two female friends, which she did not otherwise see in Bettine’s relationship with Goethe. The use of the adjective “equal” as well as the phrase “in earnest” both suggest that, because of their age, gender, or both, the friendship between the two women was more interesting/appealing in Fuller’s eyes. In the preface of *Günderode*, a longer version of her *Dial* article that was published by Elizabeth Peabody, Fuller noted, “[A]s the loveliest woman is better seen in the love she inspires in some heroic man, than in anything done or said by herself, so we see Günderode even better in her influence on Bettine than in her own letters” (vii). I interpret the suppression of the words “loveliest” and “heroic” when writing about Günderode and
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Brentano as a further, yet subtle, way of suggesting that by removing the male gaze out of the equation (and all the constraining definitions of womanhood that the male gaze entailed), women could be their truest selves and their art could shine—“we see [it] even better.” Furthermore, I argue that this quote exemplifies the subversion and suppression of male authority by Fuller, whose article “Bettine Brentano and Her Friend Günderode” creatively replaces the need for “some heroic man” (note the ironically vague adjective “some”) with a celebration of two female artists.

In this essay, I shall explore the feminist undertone of Fuller's review of *Die Günderode* and reflect on the role of gender dichotomies in her commentary on friendship in “Bettine Brentano and Her Friend Günderode.” First, I will comment on the fact that Fuller used two male figures, Goethe (and Emerson?), as foils for her portrayal of the Brentano-Günderode friendship. As she wrote in her review of *Die Günderode*, “the relation in which [Bettine] stands to Goethe is not a beautiful one” (314); “it is too unequal” (316). In her journal, she noted more bluntly that “Goethe [had] made a puppet-show, for his private entertainment, of Bettine's life” (*Memoirs* 2: 58). Commenting on the notion of “friendship,” Fuller was critical of that sort of imbalance: comparing Bettine with George Sand, she located the source of her discontent in the former's lack of self-esteem and wrote in 1839, “When I first knew George Sand, I thought to have found tried the experiment I wanted. I did not value Bettine so much. She had not pride enough for me . . . . I love ‘abandon’ only when natures are capable of the extreme reverse. I know Bettine would end in nothing; when I read her book I knew she could not outlive her love” (*Memoirs* 1: 248). Emerson, too, compared “our wonderful Bettine” with Sand: he wrote in a letter to John Heath in 1842, “we are indebted to her for the most remarkable book ever written by a woman. She is a finer genius than George Sand or Mme de Stael . . . And where shall we find another woman to compare her with” (Rusk 3: 77). However, his laudatory remarks did not include the same criticism that Fuller reserved toward Bettine's “abandonment,” which she commented again on in 1842 writing that “her boundless abandonment to one feeling must hinder for a time her progress and that her maturer years are likely to lag slowly after the fiery haste of her youth. She lived so long, not for truth, but for a human object” (“Brentano” 317).

Secondly, I shall rely on Emerson's section in *Memoirs* "Woman, or Artist?" and examine Fuller and Emerson's different understanding of such dichotomy. After Fuller's death in a shipwreck in July 1850, Emerson was asked by William Henry Channing "to write some Life of Margaret": in response to this, he explained to Samuel Gray Ward on August 2nd, "I think it could really be done, if one would heroically devote himself, and a most vivacious book written, but it must done tête exaltée, & in the tone of Spiridion, or even of Bettine" (Rusk 4: 222). Two years later, in a letter written in January 1852, he confessed to William Furness that he had "just escaped from a task that has
absorbed near six months, a labor of love, but of very questionable judgment,
—Margaret Fuller’s *Memoirs*—a great deal of labor bestowed to a very small
effect” (Fruitlands). It looks as if, after all, Emerson and the other two authors
of *Memoirs* did not manage to narrate Fuller’s life “in the tone of . . . Bettine,”
and the sense of disappointment underlying Emerson’s remarks matches most
readers’ reaction to reading *Memoirs*, a work that struggles to represent the
radicalism of her career and feminist work. Eliding the most radical aspects of
her life and career, Emerson and his two coauthors (Channing and James
Freeman Clarke) indeed provided a deeply one-dimensional portrayal of
Fuller: they ignored some of the most important aspects of Fuller’s career
and tampered unapologetically with the sources they used.

On the contrary, Fuller did not shy away from Brentano and Günderode's
nonconformist agency. Portraying their harmonious relationship as both
intrinsically feminine and “essentially poetic,” she celebrated the all-female
power of their friendship, which she wrote, “presents all that is lovely between
woman and woman, adorned by great genius and beauty on both sides”
(“Brentano” 320). Examining the parallels between artistic creation (“the life
of thought”) and human reproduction (“the life of action” [Hudspeth 2: 87]),
I will focus on Fuller's gendered commentary and show how Brentano and von
Günderode's relationship allowed her to resolve the constraining nineteenth-
century dichotomy of “woman or artist.”

Of Women and Men, of Friends and Foils

Goethe as Foil: Circles and the Ambivalent Power of Influence

One thing that Brentano and Goethe’s relationship lacked according to Fuller
was a sense of balance—and it is on that lack of balance that Fuller’s article first
centers, focusing on Bettine’s fascination for the writer and leaving Karoline
aside. Günderode is indeed curiously absent from the beginning of Fuller’s
text, which opens on the dangers of idolatrous relationships. While noting that
“[i]dolatries are natural to youthful hearts,” Fuller states that, “when this
worship is expressed, there must be singular purity and strength of character
on the part both of Idol and Idolater, to prevent its degenerating into a mutual
excitement of vanity or mere infatuation” (“Brentano” 314). As she wrote in
1839, Fuller believed that Bettine’s fascination with Goethe was one that had
“degenerated” for characterized by a very uneven balance of power—“She has
followed like a slave where she might as a pupil” (316). Zwarg hypothesizes on
the origins of Fuller’s interesting word choice, noting that

Fuller's insertion of the words *captive* and *slave* can be said to provide a feminist gloss to Hegel's treatment of *Lordship and Bondage in the Phenomenology of Spirit* (1807). It is possible she had heard something about this aspect of Hegel's thought from her friend
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Frederick Henry Hedge, whose command of German and interest in philosophy made him a particularly useful contact. (76)

As the word “slave” implies, Bettine was actually the victim in Fuller’s eyes— and Goethe, the perpetrator. In her article on *Die Günderode*, she is indeed highly critical of his condescending attitude toward Bettine: “there is an air as of an elderly guardian flirting cautiously with a giddy, inexperienced ward, or a Father Confessor, who, instead of through the holy office raising and purifying the thoughts of the devotee, uses it to gratify his curiosity” (“Brentano” 316). What Fuller is describing or denouncing here is a case of abuse of power—a power granted by experience (the “elderly guardian” versus the “inexperienced ward”) and by status (“a Father Confessor” using the “devotee”). For Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos, “Fuller dethrones Goethe as male hero,” and her article shows that “Fuller’s transformation pertained not only to breaking through values imposed by patriarchy but also to revaluing the importance of female friendship in the process of deconstructing her ideal male hero” (*Toward* 84). Surely, Fuller’s denunciation confirms what she herself wrote in the “Preface” of her translation of Eckermann’s *Conversations* in 1839—that although Goethe was “an object of peculiar interest and constant study” (175), she was “not a blind admirer” of his (Chevigny 180). However, I argue that Fuller’s critique is not that all-encompassing for Goethe’s influence also epitomizes the aura of the Romantic thinker par excellence.

The etymologies of the words that Fuller used to describe that “aura” are noteworthy: while the word “influence” originally denotes “an influx, flowing matter” or “the flowing in of ethereal fluid,” “atmosphere” comes from the Greek “atmós” (steam, vapor), suggesting that Goethe’s effect on Bettine acted as some kind of inebriating substance that she inhaled:

> She [Bettine] had grown up in the atmosphere he [Goethe] had created. Seeing him up there on the mountain, he seemed to her all beautiful and majestic in the distant rosy light of its snow-peaks. Add a nature, like one of his own melodies, as subtle, as fluent, and as productive of minute flowers and mosses, we could not wonder if one so fitted to receive him, had made of her whole life a fair sculptured pedestal for this one figure. (“Brentano” 315)

The word “atmosphere”; the series of adjectives “subtle,” “fluent,” “beautiful,” “majestic”; as well as the idea of elevation suggested by the noun phrases “up there on the mountain” and “a fair sculpture pedestal” all partake to a kind of impressionistic and Romantic portrait of the German writer. Goethe’s charming hue absorbed Bettine and seems, at first, to have taken away both agency and responsibility from her. This description resembles a passage in Fuller’s article on “Goethe” published in 1841: just like Emerson had written about conversation, which he defined as a “game of circles” (Spiller 2: 184), for Fuller, Goethe’s genius consisted in a certain kind of “circle”:
I never felt so completely that very thing which genius should always make us feel, that I was in its circle, and could not get out till its spell was done, and its last spirit permitted to depart. I was not carried away, instructed, delighted more than by other works, but I was there, living there, whether as the platan tree, or the architect, or any other observing part of the scene. The personages live too intensely to let us live in them, they draw around themselves circles within the circle, we can only see them close, not be themselves. (“Goethe” 33–34)

The circle, to which the etymology of the word “conversation” perfectly alludes, was a fundamental aspect of Fuller’s Transcendentalism: she believed that it was indeed by expanding one’s “circle” to new horizons (which explains her thirst to travel to Europe) that the individual could grow. She writes, “[W]here to find fit, though few, representatives for all we value in humanity? Where obtain those golden keys to the secret treasure-chambers of the soul? No samples are perfect. We must look abroad into the wide circle, to seek a little here, and a little there, to make up our company” (*Memoirs* 2: 297). Fuller continued to expand her circle throughout her life, through a series of geographical moves—first to New York, and then to Italy—which matched an internal sort of growth: “I have no castle, and no natural circle, in which I might live, like the wise Makaria, observing my kindred the stars, and gradually enriching my archives. Makaria here must go abroad, or the stars would hide their light, and the archive remain a blank” (*Memoirs* 2: 297).

So, while the atmosphere of Goethe’s genius absorbed Bettine almost in spite of herself, Fuller’s “Brentano” article also suggests that the same halo of charm applied to Günderode, too: “Many of the poetical fragments from the pen of Günderode are such as would not have been written had she not been the contemporary of Schelling and Fichte, yet are they native and original, the atmosphere of thought reproduced in the brilliant and delicate hues of a peculiar plant” (“Brentano” 320). We find similar terms as in the previous passage—“atmosphere,” “hues,” “plant”—and yet we understand that the “transfusion of such energies” does not imply a loss of agency for Fuller, who on the contrary defines Günderode’s work as “[n]ative and original.”

## On Goethe and Emerson: “Intellect” and “Life”

As the critics⁶ who examined Fuller’s “Brentano” article have already established, there are numerous parallels between the way in which she writes about Goethe and Brentano and her own relationship with Emerson. Written two years after the Fuller–Emerson relationship crisis,⁷ Fuller’s comments on Goethe are indeed particularly reminiscent of the problems she faced in her friendship with Emerson. About Goethe, Fuller writes that he “is so cold, so repulsive, diplomatic, and courteously determined not to compromise himself. Had he assumed truly the paternal attitude, he might have been far more gentle and tender” (“Brentano” 316). Coldness was indeed something that
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bothered Fuller tremendously in her relationship with Emerson, to the point that, in *Memoirs*, he himself defined their “war of temperaments” as follows: “Our moods were very different; and I remember, that, at the very time when I, slow and cold, had come fully to admire her genius, and was congratulating myself on the solid good understanding that subsisted between us, I was surprised with hearing it taxed by her with superficiality and halfness” (*Memoirs* 1: 288). Taking inspiration from their relationship to write about friendship was something both Fuller and Emerson did. Emerson’s famous essay “Friendship,” published in 1841, drew on his exchange with Fuller: in a letter written in July 1840, he indeed asked her “Do you happen to possess unto this day,—as I have heard you say, you keep letters,—an old one from me dated 12 Oct, 1838. I have quoted a sentence out of it into my journal which makes me think I may find a word there to fill up a bad hole in a paragraph” (Rusk 2: 314). Similarly, in 1842, Fuller’s comments on friendship seem to have been nourished by her recent falling out with Emerson. Her remarks about Bettine’s frustration sound very autobiographical: “We also feel as if she [Bettine] became too self-conscious in the course of this intimacy. There being no response from the other side to draw her out naturally, she bunts about for means to entertain a lordly guest, who brings nothing to the dinner but a silver fork” (“Brentano” 317). Fuller’s conclusion is tinted by a bitterness that seems to reflect her own suffering: “Sad are the catastrophes of friendships, for they are mostly unequal, and it is rare that more than one party keeps true to the original covenant. Happy the survivor if in losing his friend, he loses not the idea of friendship” (“Brentano” 322). The emotional hardship of friendship is what emerges most strongly out of these remarks; the adjectives “sad” and “happy” encircle Fuller’s reflection and indicate the rawness of her recent disappointment. But as Zwarg states, Fuller’s 1842 *Dial* article “did not register a turn from her relationship with Emerson so much as an enhancement of that relationship in allegorical form” (87). Fuller is indeed not hopeless and addresses herself directly to the similarly discouraged reader to reassure them—“Be not faithless, thou whom I see wandering alone amid the tombs of thy buried loves. The relation thou hast thus far sought in vain is possible even on earth to calm, profound, tender, and unselfish natures; it is assured in heaven, where only chastened spirits can enter,—pilgrims dedicate to Perfection” (“Brentano” 322). The confusion between Fuller and her audience (to whom she addresses herself directly, “thou whom I see wandering alone”) partakes of that connection that Fuller “the translator” wanted to establish with her readers (see Zwarg’s comments), but it also establishes a very intimate sort of link between the two because, by prophesizing a happy ending to the disappointed reader, Fuller is simultaneously promising herself the prospect of a more successful friendship still to come.

That being said, I believe that the parallels between Goethe and Emerson that Fuller establishes in her reflection on friendship extend beyond the
factuality of personal misunderstandings. Fuller's critique of Goethe as a friend of Bettine, which reads as a reflection of her critique of Emerson as her friend, is crucial not only because it acts as a foil to her praise of Günderode and Brentano's relationship but also because it concurrently captures a fundamental aspect of Fuller's Transcendentalism—i.e. the tension between “intellect” and “life.” About Goethe, she writes:

> Of Goethe, as of other natures, where the intellect is too much developed in proportion to the moral nature, it is difficult to speak without seeming narrow, blind, and impertinent. For such men *see* all that others *live* . . . Yet they are not, nay *know* not, they only discern. The difference is that between sight and life, prescience and being, wisdom and love. Thus with Goethe. Naturally of a deep mind and shallow heart, he felt the sway of the affections enough to appreciate their working in other men, but never enough to receive their inmost regenerating influence. (“Goethe” 2)

In this excerpt from Fuller's 1841 article, sight is elevated to the point where it is presented as characteristic of Goethe's genius, of which “it is difficult to speak without seeming narrow, blind, and impertinent.” Goethe belongs to that category of people who are different precisely because “such men *see* all that others *live*”: these men are above others, and they stand in a higher position from which they can observe reality with a certain distance. However, for Fuller, the capacity of “seeing” is also synonymous with a certain lack of “being”: “they are not, nay *know* not, they only discern . . . he felt the sway of the affections enough to appreciate their working in other men, but never enough to receive their inmost regenerating influence.” Etymologically related to the notion of “separation,” discernment is what prevents this type of person from uniting affectionally with others.

This characterization of Goethe cannot be read without also mentioning Fuller's famous line to Emerson: "You are intellect, I am life" (Hudspeth 3: 209). The tension between "intellect" and "life" was indeed a leitmotif of the Fuller-Emerson relationship, which was strained by their different personalities. Elsewhere, Fuller commented, "He has little sympathy with mere life: does not seem to see the plants grow, merely that he may rejoice in their energy" (*Woman* 184). Contrary to Emerson, to whom she attributed the role of the observer (one who is gratified through observation), Fuller positioned herself on the side of "life" and of the "plants [that] grow." Caleb Crain, commenting on Fuller's remarks on Plato in a letter to Caroline Sturgis from 1839, writes that the "real, including the indelicacy and pain of human relationships, was not a thing to be overcome. That was not how Fuller understood transcendence. Rather, the antagonism between real and ideal had to be fully lived" (197). "Plants," "life," and "growth" are very interesting terms, especially if considered from a feminist viewpoint: on the one hand, women were often denigratingly associated with "plants" (it was implied that they were similarly ornamental). On the other hand, the magic of creation and
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"growth"—a power that belongs exclusively to women if we think of it in terms of human reproduction—was fascinating and unique.

The tension between “real” and “ideal,” which we might also connect with the dichotomous opposition between human reproduction and artistic production, is at the heart of Emerson’s section “Woman, or Artist?” in *Memoirs*.

## Woman, or Artist: Of Dilemmas and Dichotomies

Fuller's feminist views, and what she represented as a woman intellectual, generated great challenges for her male commentators. As pinpointed by Ann Douglas, Fuller essentially posed a dilemma: she "is so disquieting because she does not lend herself to the fantasy life, to the essentially *fictional* identity associated with women. Her image can be attacked or ignored, but it is not malleable" (38). And part of the struggle to deal with "the Fuller dilemma" was the lack of vocabulary to define her. In fact, in antebellum America, womanhood was mostly associated with passivity, self-sacrifice, and physical beauty, according to the precepts of the "Cult of True Womanhood" (only rarely did "womanhood" rhyme with intellect or, even less often, did it imply any type of agency). Fuller did not meet the expectations associated with her gender in the first half of the nineteenth century: while, as Susan M. Cruea writes, "motherhood was valued as the most fulfilling and essential of all women's duties, a view extending the eighteenth-century ideal of Republican Motherhood" (188), Fuller initially did not want any children: "I have no child; but now, as I look on these lovely children of a human birth, what low and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother!" (*Memoirs* 1: 293). What is more, she also initially rejected marriage, writing that "I remain fixed to be, without churlishness or coldness, as much alone as possible. It is best for me. I am not fitted to be loved" (*Memoirs* 1: 292).

Like other male commentators, Emerson struggled to reconcile himself with the challenges posed by Fuller's unconventional persona. He addressed this directly in *Memoirs*:

> Practical questions in plenty the days and months brought her to settle,—questions requiring all her wisdom, and sometimes more than all. None recurs with more frequency, at one period, in her journals, than the debate with herself, whether she shall make literature a profession. Shall it be woman, or shall it be artist? (*Memoirs* 1: 294)

The fact that Fuller did not fit in any specific category deeply unsettled Emerson: as Tiffany Wayne explains, “[H]is inability to imagine any social contribution from women at all beyond the domestic role led him to categorize all women as either ‘wives’ or, if freed from the particular duties of marriage (and, presumably, motherhood) to pursue the life of the mind, as ‘muses’” (24). In this section, I focus on the dichotomy between “woman” and “artist,” which pervades Emerson’s portrayal of
Fuller in *Memoirs*. Emerson's struggle to come to terms with the unconventional nature of Fuller's radical views suggests the complexity of the social position occupied by women thinkers in antebellum America.

"Children of Human Birth" and "Children of the Muse"

Creation acts as the main focus of Emerson's section "Woman, or Artist?" in *Memoirs*. Separated by a comma, the words "woman" and "artist" stand in apparent opposition to each other, while the question mark included in the title suggests the presumed impossibility of being both "woman" and "artist." This section of *Memoirs* is quite similar in its structure to the rest of the work —Emerson's commentary frames quotations taken from Fuller's letters and journals. The passages written by Emerson in this specific section center on the tension between ideal and real—a tension that echoes the title "woman, or artist." "Art" could refer to both "craftsmanship" and "higher art." But here—opposed to "woman," a term which was mostly tied to the idea of domesticity in the mid-nineteenth century—it denotes a certain elevated detachment from everyday life. In Emerson's words, this tension is expressed through the contrast between what he calls the "disappointing forms of men and women" and "the children of the muse." He writes:

> Margaret resolved, again and again, to devote herself no more to these disappointing forms of men and women, but to the children of the muse. "The dramatis personœ," she said, "of my poems shall henceforth be chosen from the children of immortal Muse. I fix my affections no more on these frail forms." But it was vain; she rushed back again to persons, with a woman's devotion. (*Memoirs* 1: 294)

The expression “children of the muse” is very interesting, for it associates the reproductive power of woman to the idealized female figure.

Childbirth and childcare are aspects of a woman's life that Bettine Brentano experienced very early on: married to Achim von Arnim in 1811, Bettine had seven children with him before he died in 1831. Alongside being a mother of seven, she became an influential writer and political thinker (see *The King's Book*):⁸ she was familiar with and had an obvious first-hand experience of the toll of domestic duties on women. As Fry remarks, "[A]spiring authors like Fuller possessed few examples of female artists who transcended established social roles and who expressed creative genius as defined in romantic dis-course" (251). Bettine was, at least in some respects, a model for Fuller, as shown by the letter of admiration she wrote to her on November 2nd, 1840:

> I write to you in the name of many men and many women of my country for whom you have wrought wonders . . . . Thou art dear to us, thou art the friend of our inmost mood. We do not wish to hear street gossip about thee. We will not hear it. Speak to us thyself
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>

[for] you are wise, you have the spiritual sight, the breath of our love will be wafted to you and you will see whether we are yours. (Hudspeth 2: 328–29)

It is important to emphasize that Fuller wrote to Bettine using the first-person plural pronoun “we” as if, while showing her admiration, she was also expressing America’s gratitude for Bettine’s service. Service to whom, might we ask? To intellect and to the cause of women’s rights: Bettine was a rare example of a successful woman intellectual, but, above all, she was a prime example of someone who had a “spiritual sight.” While Fuller had taxed Goethe of feeling “the sway of the affections enough to appreciate their working in other men, but never enough to receive their inmost regenerating influence” (“Goethe” 2), Bettine had, on the other hand, become the friend of readers’ “inmost mood.”

However laudatory this may have been, this is a letter to which Brentano never replied: Sotiropoulos interrogates Fuller’s silence on Brentano in the years that followed her 1842 *Dial* article, noting that “Fuller never referred to or attempted to communicate with von Arnim again” (“Truth” 36). Sotiropoulos indeed “ invite[s] one to ask why Fuller fell off the von Arnim fan wagon” (“Truth” 36–37) but recognizes that one can only speculate as to the real answer to that question. Despite not being a mother until she was 38, Fuller herself, like Bettine, knew what it meant to bear the responsibility of a household. At age twenty-five, upon her father’s death (1835), Fuller shoul- dered heavy responsibility for her mother and five younger siblings. If by “artist” we mean an intellectual, then Fuller had to find ways to fructify such a speculative position in order to survive as a woman in the nineteenth century.

## Action in Fuller’s Eyes

In the section “Woman, or Artist?” Emerson reports a comment that Fuller made on the importance of “living” in December 1842:

> I have been reading the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and of Sir Kenelm Digby. These splendid, chivalrous, and thoughtful Englishmen are meat which my soul loveth, even as much as my Italians. What I demand of men,—that they could act out all their thoughts,—hese have. They are lives; and of such I do not care if they had as many faults as there are days in the year,—there is the energy to redeem them. (*Memoirs* 1: 294–95)

This passage shows the importance as well as the meaning of “living” in Fuller’s eyes. It is the capacity for “enaction” that Fuller admired in these men—“They are lives,” she writes, precisely because they are able to “act out all their thoughts.” It is interesting to note that, in *Memoirs*, Emerson links the concept of “action” to Fuller, but he presents it in a negative light, as though it were a distraction from her intellectual pursuits: there were “practical problems Margaret had to entertain and to solve the best way she could . . . . But she was formed for action, and addressed herself quite simply to her part. She
was a woman, an orphan, without beauty, without money” (*Memoirs* 1: 297–98).

There is, then, both in Emerson and Fuller’s writing, a tension between artistic creation and human reproduction. This parallel is a trope that is not infrequent but it is particularly important for the sake of this essay for it seems to encapsulate all the difficulties linked to the status of women intellectuals and to how their lives were narrated (as in Fuller’s “Brentano” article and in Emerson’s *Memoirs*).

Fuller’s remarks about her own writing (i.e. artistic creation), which Emerson quotes in *Memoirs*, are unsurprisingly concerned with the ties between artistic creation and gender—“a woman of tact and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men” (295), and “gentlemen are surprised that I write no better, because I talk so well. But I have served a long apprenticeship to the one, none to the other” (*Memoirs* 1: 296). Her comments also reveal the difficulty of being both a woman and an artist: “One should be either private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitly-bounded to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle; as, on the other hand, I should palsy, when I would play the artist” (*Memoirs* 1: 297). This tension between “public” and “private” is the same on which gender discrimination based itself for a long time (women’s world coinciding with the private sphere, while men were in charge of the public sphere). And yet it is a tension that Fuller was willing to defy. Later in life, living in Rome during Giuseppe Mazzini’s republican revolution, Fuller deplored the limitations imposed to women, who were bound by the walls of the private sphere, and declared that, if she could, she would have been happy to assume the very public role of US ambassador: “Pray send here a good Ambassador-one that has experience of foreign life, that he may act with good judgment,” she wrote in December 1848, and then, presciently and full of hope, she added, “Another century, and I might ask to be made Ambassador myself ... but woman’s day has not come yet” (*Glorious* 245).

## Artistic Creation and Women’s Liberation: The Power of “Life”

### Bettine and Karoline According to Fuller

By publishing her letter exchange with her friend Karoline, Bettine had, in some ways, managed to redefine a woman’s private life by equating it to genius rather than to domesticity. She provided an insight into the “interior of German life,” which fascinated Fuller to the point, perhaps, of blinding her a little bit about the reality of German society—“not only are these letters interesting as presenting this view of the interior of German life, and of an ideal relation realized, but the high state of culture in Germany … had made
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /></figure>

them expressions of the noblest aspirations” (“Brentano” 5). Fuller’s deep
admiration for Bettine’s letters also resulted in an idealization of German
domestic life: “We think with unmingled pleasure of the two seated together
beside the stove in Günderode’s little room, walking in Madame La Roche’s
garden, where they ‘founded a religion for a young prince,’ or on the Rhine, or
in the old castle on the hill, as described in the following beautiful letters”
(“Brentano” 323). Fuller’s admiration for *Die Günderode* is palpable through-
out her review as she celebrates the literary exploit that such a book repre-
sented. As Fry states, the “primary problem for women who like Fuller and
Brentano-von Arnim wanted to enter the male-dominated sphere of literary
production lay in confronting notions of feminine identity that promoted
a passive and domestic role for women rather than an intellectually active
and liberated one” (247). Bettine had taken self-writing and artistic creation
into her own hands by publishing her correspondence with Günderode, which
took place between 1804 and 1806, commencing when von Arnim was nine-
ten, thus thirty-four years before von Arnim’s 1840 publication. As
Sotiropoulos indicates, the “title of the epistolary novel is somewhat mislead-
ing, as the letters from Bettine far outnumber those from Karoline: thirty-
seven from Bettine, twenty-three from Karoline. Thus Bettine is very much
a subject and object of her own book, along with Karoline” (*Toward* 82). The
agency of such literary production certainly satisfied Fuller’s feminism.

Unlike the toxic Brentano-Goethe relationship on which Brentano's first
epistolary novel focused, Fuller viewed the friendship of “Bettine” and
“Karoline” as a much more balanced type of relationship. Indeed, Fuller's
article reads as a celebration of the notion of harmony—intended as comple-
mentarity rather than similarity—on which Fuller writes, “[t]he advantage in
years, the higher culture, and greater harmony of Günderode's nature is
counter-balanced, by the ready springing impulse; richness and melody of
the other” (320). Musical harmony (alluded to through the words “melody,”
“springing impulse,” “richness”) is used to characterize the friendship between
the two women whom, despite embodying “two different modes of life,” are
“the two beautiful figures which animate and portray these modes of life [and]
are in perfect harmony with them” (318). Günderode, herself of a more
“delicate and reserved nature” than Bettine, wrote, “[t]hou hast a much
more energetic nature than I, indeed than almost any of whom I am able to
judge” (Fuller, “Brentano” 353). However, Fuller notes that these differences
constituted “no drawback upon the beauty of this intimacy—there being
sufficient nearness of age to give Günderode just the advantage needful with
so daring a child as Bettine, and a sufficient equality in every other respect”
(322). Once again, this contrasts with Brentano’s age difference from Goethe,
who was 26 years older than her. In fact, Bettine’s mother, Maximiliane, and
Goethe had also been friends—however, the friendship ended abruptly “and
35 years later her daughter took her place” (“Bettina von Arnim”).
Difference, just like harmony, is a key concept in Fuller's commentary on friendship for, while Fuller begins by opposing the relationship between Goethe and Bettine to the latter's friendship with Karoline, she then goes on to interpret the "difference" between the women as follows:

> I have ... distinguished the two as Nature and Ideal. Bettine, hovering from object to object, drawing new tides of vital energy from all, ... is not this pervasive vital force, cause of the effect which we call nature? And Günderode, ... harmonizing all objects into their true relations, drawing from every form of life its eternal meaning. (319)

What emerges from this important passage is the transformational power of woman's genius: "difference" between two friends can be positive. While Bettine is described as "restless, fearless, clinging to love, yet unwearied in experiment," Günderode, on the other hand, is a "pervasive force" that "transfigure[s]," "harmonizing" and "drawing new tides of vital energy" (4). What is more, Fuller depicts this transformational force by the two women as creative and reciprocal: "The action of these two beings upon one another, as representing classes of thoughts, is thus of the highest poetical significance. As persons, their relation is not less beautiful" ("Brentano" 319). Here, the insistence on duality ("two," "upon one another") as well as on dichotomies ("thoughts"/"action," "beings"/"classes")brings our attention to the notions of "action" and of "poetry," which come together in this "woman-centered, spiritual alternative" to Romantic, male poetic creation (Avallone 339).

## Gender and Poetry

Several years before she wrote her *Dial* article, during one of her stays at Emerson's house in Concord, Fuller asked the following rhetorical question: "Who would be a goody that could be a genius?" (Gilman 5: 40). While with that remark Fuller "seemed to dismiss the notions of separate roles or separate spheres for women," as pinpointed by Barbara Packer (801), her article on *Die Günderode* actually places gender at the center of her reasoning, celebrating the all-female power of the Brentano-Günderode relationship. Fuller describes their "relation" as "present[ing] all that is lovely between woman and woman, adorned by great genius and beauty on both sides" ("Brentano" 320). Gender is thus central to her commentary of this "true friendship" between young women (6), which Fuller clearly distinguishes from the friendship between two young men:

> An intimacy between two young men is heroic ... As the life of man is to be active, they have still more the air of brothers in arms than of fellow students. But the relation between two young girls is essentially poetic ... There is a fluent tenderness, a native elegance in the arrangement of trifling incidents, a sincere childlike sympathy in aspirations that mark the destiny of woman. She should be the poem, man the poet. ("Brentano" 319)
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>

Poetry, as creation, is therefore for Fuller a power emanating from true female relationships, whereas action seems to be more characteristic of male friendships. Although Fuller is reiterating the traditional association of man “the poet” and woman “the muse” (“She should be the poem, man the poet”), there is something very interesting in the elevation of woman’s power in her remarks that connects both to her Transcendentalism and her feminism. Indeed, the noun phrases “native elegance” and “fluent tenderness” point to innate qualities in woman, which are akin to art, and imply a sense of power—or artistic agency—which contrasts sharply with nineteenth-century negative characterizations of anything “womanly.” If Sotiropoulos argues that “[f]or Fuller, the transformational potential inhering in female friendship complicated the principle of self-reliance inculcated by her father, manifested in her male literary and historical heroes, and formulated into a philosophy by Emerson” (*Toward* 84), I think that the “transformational potential” of Fuller’s vision lies in the redefinition of friendship between women as “essentially poetic.” After all, “poetry” comes from “poiein,” to make, linking elevation through art to the idea of action. For Fuller, Karoline and Bettine’s relationship was a creative sort of union that combined artistic production and intellectual elevation. This is reiterated by Fuller as she compares Cleone and Aspasia, in Walter Savage Landor’s work, to Bettine and Karoline—“Aspasia and Cleone is not unlike this between Bettine and Günderode, in the influences of the two characters upon one another” (“Brentano” 20). Fuller expands on this comparison by describing how, while “Bettine feels in her friend the same joy and pride which is expressed in Aspasia . . . . Cleone regards Aspasia with the same admiration, angelic in its pure humility, though melancholy in its smile, as Günderode does Bettine” (“Brentano” 349). And yet Fuller concludes that the “book of ‘Günderode’ is more poetic than ‘Pericles and Aspasia,’ in this, that we see living and changing before us what is only given us as results, of fixed outline in Landor’s book. This breathing life makes us living; that pictured life only commanded us to live” (“Brentano” 350). Not only is creation a property of the Günderode-Brentano relationship, but Fuller concludes that it is also transformative for us readers who benefit from that relation by “living” through it and with it.

Fuller’s depiction of the friendship between Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Karoline von Günderode celebrates female artistic genius in a way that frees it completely from male domination. Creation is described as a female and essentially poetic property. While maintaining essentialist views, Fuller elevates relationships between women: the idealization of the Brentano-Günderode friendship, and friendships between women more generally, allows her to reframe the concept of womanhood. By idealizing and sublimating human relationships into works of art, Fuller is initiating a conversation about the notion of “creation”: women are more than just
reproductive creators—she argues—women are also artists (and both elements can coexist).

Fuller's redefinition of “womanhood” indeed blurs the lines between artistic creation and human reproduction. Bettine's book, Fuller writes, “is true, and of the rarest excellence, a many-petaled flower on the bosom of nature, from which the dew shall never varnish” (“Brentano” 353). In true Transcendentalist fashion, nature pervades Fuller's characterizations, in which the beauty of the natural world merges with literary production —“Like the sky lark's, these morning songs drop from the clouds which upbear the songster dew from heaven, such as active, lustrous, enduring, prying day shall never boast” (“Brentano” 353). If in one of her letters (translated here by Fuller), Günderode wrote that if Bettine had “been a boy, thou wouldst have become a hero, but as thou art a girl I interpret all these dispositions as furnishing materials for a future life, preparation for an energetic character which perhaps in a living active time will be born” (“Brentano” 355), Fuller suppresses the need for any model of male authority and celebrates the literary and transcending power of a woman's life.

## Notes

1. Another important dimension of Fuller's feminist enterprise is that, with participants paying a fee, these encounters also enabled her to earn a living. As indicated by Charles Capper, “each woman paid ten dollars for a ticket of admission to the two-hour, thirteen-week series,” which “was over three times what Alcott brought in ... from his conversations, and about two-thirds of what Emerson then made from an equivalent number of lectures” (293).

2. Fuller translated the first third of its 600 pages. This was published in 1842 by Elizabeth Peabody. The last two-thirds were translated by Minna Wesselhoeft and published in 1861 (Sotiropoulos, “Truth” 36n3).

3. The friendship took place from 1804 to Günderode's suicide in 1806.

4. These two would be followed the next year by a brief commentary on a translation of “Goethe’s ‘Egmont,’” which appeared in the *Dial* in January 1842.

5. Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde was published three years after Goethe’s death.

6. See especially Sotiropoulos, “Fuller, Goethe, Bettine Cultural Transfer and Imagined German Womanhood” and “Speaking Truth to Divergent Powers: Margaret Fuller, Bettina Von Arnim and the Broken Bond”; Zwarg, “Feminism in Translation: Fuller’s Tasso and Günderode” in Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading; English, “‘Genuine Transcripts of Private Experience:’ Margaret Fuller and Translation”; Avallone, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845): Romanticism and (Proto)Feminism” in Handbook of American Romanticism; Fry, “Elective Androgyny: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Margaret Fuller’s Reception of Goethe.”

7. See Christopher Hanlon's analysis in Emerson's Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style (2017).

8. “Das Königsbuch exposed social conditions and promulgated the vision of a freer society [and for that] von Arnim was perceived as an oppositionist and admired by freedom
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /></figure>

seekers despite the fact that the means the book advocated were not revolutionary”
(Sotiropoulos, “Truth” 36–37).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributor

*Alice de Galzain* is a postdoctoral researcher at Sorbonne University. Her project, entitled "Women Networks and Transcendentalist Utopias: Health, Gender, and Reform," aims to uncover the feminist subculture that existed within Transcendentalist utopias (Brook Farm, Fruitlands).

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