The World of the Transcendentalists

After my Aunt Margaret’s mystical epiphany on that cold Thanksgiving Day, she never again doubted that her life held meaning. Having resolved an overwhelming problem, she was now ready to pursue the path that she believed would lead her to union with God.

The death of her father, Timothy Fuller, in October of 1835 seemed to mark both the end of a chapter in Margaret’s life, and the beginning of a new one. She soon joined the Transcendental Club – the circle of radical, young Bostonian ministers who believed in Bildung, the German term meaning “self-culture”.

The transcendentalists believed that the man had the potential to become a God-like being. They taught that only through constant self-improvement could a human fulfill his purpose on earth, and thus truly serve both God and neighbor. Finding these statutes to be compatible with her own beliefs, Margaret made fast friends with many of the movement’s greatest minds. Some of her life-long companions included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Henry Channing, and Frederick H. Hedge. At this time of her life, she became associated with other prominent writers, as well. Her literary criticism was integral to the eventual fame of both Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville; and her passionate, stubborn temperament inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne to create the character of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.

Margaret’s professional career began in 1836, when she took up the position of assistant in Bronson Alcott’s experimental Temple School in Boston. As a transcendentalist, Alcott advocated the reform of children’s education. Encouraged and enlightened by her experience with the Temple School, Margaret went on to teach at Rhode Island’s Greene Street School in 1837.

Fuller began to write literary criticism in earnest, and, in 1839, she was invited by Emerson to become the editor of The Dial, the publication of the Transcendental Club. For about the next five years, The Dial would become the vehicle to Margaret’s success as a writer and critic. It ended up publishing her most daring series of criticisms, upon the work of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In 1839, Margaret also organized a woman’s Conversational Club, which met regularly to discuss topics such as ancient mythology, religion, and philosophy.

Margaret reached her full zenith as a philosophical thinker and social commentator in Summer On the Lakes, in 1843, the account of her travels into the West. In 1845, Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published. It was this work, in which Margaret’s feminist convictions fully emerge, that truly set her apart from all other participants in the movement of transcendentalism.