A Beauteous Tree: Margaret Fuller's "Femality" | Curator's Essay

not just song, but a delicate poetry in another language that spreads out across the lake.

Each “imperial vestal” bloom among the “firm, glistening, broad, green leaves” of the tree produces music that enchants the astonished young man. The magnolia invites him to listen to her story, promising not to “overpower thee by too much sweetness” as her voice is “more deep and full than that of [her] beautiful sisters…though my root is the same as that of the other virgins of our royal house, I bear not the same blossom, nor can I unite my voice with theirs in the forest choir. Therefore I dwell here alone, nor did I ever expect to tell the secret of my loneliness.”

The quality of her perfume expresses her unique personality and sets the magnolia apart from the other trees in the forest choir and she is lonely because of it. Due to her difference, she stands apart from the other trees. Through the “deep,” “full” tone of her voice, the different blossoms she bears, her floral “lips” of “untouched purity,” the description here builds up a notion of sexuality through smell, flowers, leaves, and roots, bypassing the attributes of the human body, leaving the precise nature of her gender identity open to interpretation. Adjectives used throughout the story such as “imperial,” “vestal,” “sovereign” imbue the tree with a majestic, untainted, perfection giving her an undiluted, powerful, divine sense of self—she is a goddess.

The story represents Fuller’s spiritual quest to trace her feminine creative roots back to the source of female genius and the magnolia is fitting choice to represent it. It is known to symbolize yin, the feminine side of life. Rather than a small plant or bush it’s a flowering tree with an extensive root system and branches, an apt metaphor for deep and expansive creativity. The genus magnolia is also extremely ancient, dating back as far as 95 million years. It is thought to be one of the first flowering plants to evolve on earth. The species has changed very little, making it a symbol of stability and grace. Not only is the magnolia ancient, it is also extremely tough. Magnolias appeared before the more gentle pollination vehicle of bees so they cultivated big showy flowers and fragrance to attract beetles and tough petals that could endure the gnawing of beetle mandibles. Ancient and unchanging, enduring, strong, and graceful, Fuller could not have chosen a more apt flower to symbolize an ancient goddess of creativity. But she was not always a goddess. Once upon a time, she was a different tree altogether.

The magnolia explains she was not always a lakeside poet but once resided in the form of an orange tree, occupied in producing bridal “garlands” and “golden fruit” for merchants and “ornaments” for the halls of noblemen—all symbolic of the conventional nineteenth-century woman’s fate of marriage, wife, and motherhood. The feelings of pride and pleasure the tree takes in satisfying these domestic needs fades as those she supplies take her gifts for granted.

“I had no mine or thine,”; “I belonged to all, I could never rest, I was never at one,” she laments expressing the struggle of mothers and housewives. Increasingly, “painfully” she “felt this want” and with every new blossom “sighed entreaties” and “implored answers.”

Unappreciated and weary, the tree withers and dies from cold and exhaustion and appears before “the queen and guardian of flowers” who advises her to “Take a step inward” and become a magnolia. The death of the orange represents her departure from a traditional Victorian female role.

The orange tree blackens and withers, reminding me of the “flowers that are planted in too rich a soil” that Mary Wollstonecraft describes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft uses the floral metaphor to comment on the social emphasis upon female cosmetic beauty and ability to please others: the “flaunting leaves,” of woman, “after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.” This pioneer of women’s rights, points out the

disservice and tragedy of a social system that emphasizes the fleeting trait of beauty and submissive domesticity and discourages cultivation of intellect and physical strength.

In such a system, once beauty is gone, women lose all value and presence within society.

Both orange tree and the lurid blooms in Wollstonecraft languish and fade before their time. Visualizing this idea, the pendulous flowers of Mary Warner’s painting, Disco Garden, draw all the attention; the hardy stalks necessary to support their weight are insubstantial shadows, gesturing toward a social emphasis on beauty that occurs at the expense of health and strength in women and sometimes even in men.

Always a creative being, the magnolia tree transitions from domestic creative labor to a more philosophical creative labor. This transition could arguably represent a shift from feminine to a masculine role. Certainly, the tree escapes a role akin to an underappreciated housewife deprived of intellectual pursuits. But rather than a masculine power, her transformation is enabled by the queen of the flowers, who is “secret, radiant, profound ever, never to be known was she; many forms indicate and none declare her.”

This suggests not only a feminine source of creativity but also a lost feminine identity, a latent understanding of femaleness that is hidden everywhere but not comprehended within current social conceptions of the gender.

The closest representation available of Fuller’s notion of femininity is the Roman goddess she idolizes, Minerva, who is an expression of dual-gendered creativity. She is typically portrayed as an androgynous figure, often with short hair and feminine facial features, clad in armor, with shield and sword. Even when wearing a dress, such as in Sandro Botticelli’s painting Minerva and the Centaur, she is still armed with a long axe, shield slung across her back. She is the goddess of war and commerce as well as a patron of poetry, arts, and crafts. It comes as no surprise that Fuller’s favorite works of art were created during the Renaissance, especially paintings of goddesses like Minerva and Diana and the sibyls and angels of Michelangelo.

Fuller’s interest in classical art arises from the markedly different role that women take on in Greek and Roman mythology: “Generally, we are told of these nations,” remarks Fuller, “that women occupied there a very subordinate position in actual life, it is difficult to believe this when we see such range and dignity of those on the subject in the mythologies, and find the poets producing such ideals as Cassandra, Iphigenia, Antigone, Macaria…Diana, Minerva and Vesta…Unlike in expression of their beauty, but alike in this, —each was self-sufficing” (“The Great Lawsuit” 20–21).

The women of ancient Greece are known to have struggled within a male-dominated society, but their counterparts, the goddesses, priestesses, and heroines in mythology, offer undeniably bold manifestations of powerful, intelligent, female psyches. Fuller looks to the creative female ideal of the past that is beautiful, fierce, and independent, to critique that of her present. However, the ideal she seeks to reclaim is a mix of feminine and masculine traits—the epitome of “femality.”

She argues that it is “no more the order of nature that [femality] should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy should exist unmingled with it in any form.”

The two elements may randomly intermix. She continues, “Nature sends women into battle, and sets Hercules to spinning; she enables women to bear immense burdens, cold and frost; she enables the man, who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant…presently she will make a female Newton, and a male Syren [sic].” Way ahead of her time, she

envisions radical swapping of gender roles; perhaps one day these roles may be conceived of without recourse to gender.

In her definition of “femality” Fuller explains, “male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another.

Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” This concept is filled with energy pulsing back and forth. The set of images by Eric LoPresti felt like a visualization of that male and female energy blooming and sinking, perpetually moving in a cycle of renewal. The shallow dish of the crater is the concave image to the convex of the pink waterlily. The James Gobel piece feels similarly in flux. It is a dialectical image that refuses closure, moving between male and female, somehow both yet neither; like an optical illusion, depending on the viewer it will lean more one way than the other.

Fuller’s notions of “femality” carry forward and are found in the writing of Virginia Woolf and Donna Harraway. In her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf tells us “It is fatal,” for a writer, “to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”: “Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the action of creating can be accomplished. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.”

Just as Fuller does, Woolf makes it clear that creativity is a blend of the two genders, implying that the rush of “solid” to “fluid” fertilizes the creative act within the mind that produces art. The cerebral combination results in a mental serenity able to comprehend life in its totality.

The rushing solid-fluid gold of Harold Paris’ effulgent Oil Spill Soul resonates with Woolf’s “wide open” “incandescent” “androgynous mind” that is “resonant and porous…express[ing] itself without impediment.” A luminous bubble of thought wells up transmitting energy, consummating ideas upon Paris’s golden “page.” The glowing tablet is reminiscent of Freud’s mystic pad in which flickering thoughts inscribe themselves upon the surface of the mind and then sink down into the wax of memory. Modigliani’s androgynous pencil portrait with its long face, nose, and neck likewise offers a serene countenance that expresses long thoughts flowing into eternity. The elongated visage also brings to mind Donna Harraway’s notion of quintessence and cyborgs.

The mannequins depicted in Lolita Develay’s painting, Secrets to Tell, struck me as visual representations of the cyborgs made of ether, quintessence, that Harraway describes in her 1980 Cyborg Manifesto. Quintessence, is a wholly new substance, set apart from the traditional four—a fifth element. Quintessence is ether, “the constituent matter of heavenly bodies”—starlight. It is described as “pure and concentrated essence of substance,” “the most perfect embodiment of something.” This substance is an ungendered, unquantifiable, creative essence. Lacking definition and thus flaws, quintessence transcends perfection.

Haraway’s cyborg quintessence shares a kindred spirit with Woolf’s description of the incandescent androgynous mind. The slick chrome beings populating the painting both radiate and absorb the light of the space. The clothing they wear hangs upon them like arbitrary window dressing, bestowing gender of male or female.

Despite Fuller’s insistence upon mingling genders she also tells us in the magnolia story that all the “secret power are ‘mothers’” and that “man never creates, he only recombines the