Haunting Transcendentalist Landscapes: EcoGothic Politics in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes

"The 'eco' in Ecogothic isn't just about 'going green.' It's about the voices, the dreams and desires, the moral quandaries, the insights and incommensurable differences that are present in our interactions with nature. It is a literary space in which the human cannot take its role as the mover-and-shaker of the universe for granted."Hilary Scharper, author of the EcoGothic novel Perdita1Transcendentalist thinker Margaret Fuller hoped to find solace from personal grief in the natural landscapes she would encounter on her 1843 journey to the Great Lakes. The lingering feeling of the loss of her father, the growing frustration with Emerson manifest in her correspondence with him, and her sense of alienation as a woman in American society all contributed to a growing feeling of depression. As biographer Meg McGavran Murray points out, even though Fuller had recently written her feminist manifesto, "The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women" (published in The Dial, July 1843), she still had misgivings about herself as a woman of intellectual substance and felt haunted by her male mentors, "No matter how ardently Fuller had argued the equality of men and woman, she still harbored doubts about her worthiness in the eyes not only of Emerson but also of her dead father, who still always seemed to be watching" (198). The image of the haunting father appears in the "Miranda" section of Fuller's "The Great Lawsuit" essay: "To this ideal image of her father, to him whose 'image' lived in her, Fuller paid homage in words that reveal her continuing bondage to a haunting, godlike man, her reluctance to see her dead father as flawed" (Murray 199). Her journey to the Great Lakes might be seen as an attempt to exorcize the influence of her dead father as well as remove herself from the ongoing frustrating communications with the paternalistic and hyper-rational Emerson.2 The trip to the Midwest afforded Fuller the opportunity to renew herself in an entirely different landscape: "Fuller's dawning knowledge of her power, of a magnetic energy she felt forced to repress in the Northeast, generated an anxiety she hoped to overcome by leaving New England and finding a place where society's laws were more tolerant of passionate women like herself" (Murray 202).Although Fuller's grief was at first internalized, and her sadness cast upon the object of her gaze, whether waterfalls, lakes, or forest, she ultimately quit her subjective feelings of despair for a more coherent vision of her place within the All, emblematic of the Romantic quest for wholeness. In so doing, though, Fuller is ultimately haunted by a national consciousness and feeling of guilt more frightening than the sense of an isolated individual engulfed in grief. The panorama of shame that opens up allows her to move from individual mourning to a chilling encounter with national hauntings. A Gothic landscape of capitalist waste as well as the decimation of Native Americans moves her ultimately to question her place in nature, as a visitor/intruder, as an author, and as a mourner.Timothy Morton in Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007) has described a type of nihilistic vision of nature, in which the observer is actually rendered helpless in articulating his relationship with nature: "We discover how nature always slips out of reach in the very act of grasping it" (19). Morton argues that nature exists but cannot be perceived in any objective manner by the observer. In fact, he shows how different political agendas have caused the spectator of nature to see the landscape in vastly different ways:Since the Romantic period, nature has been used to support the capitalist theory of value and to undermine it; to point out what is intrinsically human, and to exclude the human; to inspire kindness and compassion, and to justify competition and cruelty. (19)This phantasmagoric image of nature, as Morton presents it (although he does not concern himself with the Gothic), becomes the underpinning for the EcoGothic landscape, as I see it, in Fuller and in Thoreau. …