Earlier this year, Jenessa Kenway curated A Beauteous Tree: Margaret Fuller's Femality, a group exhibition that ran in the Barrick Museum's Work Shop Gallery from May 28 - July 24. In this essay she talks about the inspiration behind the exhibition and the ideas that led to the inclusion of specific works by Lolita Develay, Eric LoPresti, Lance L. Smith, Mary Warner, and others. A shorter version of the same essay is included in the exhibition catalog. Photo credit: Lonnie Timmons III/UNLV Creative Services
“I felt that I had been that beauteous tree, but now only was—what—I knew not; yet I was…” -Margaret Fuller
When I was a child, I used to hide in the closet with a flashlight and draw picture after picture of willow trees. Something about the long weeping tendrils captured my imagination. My favorite pen to sketch them with had scented ink in flavors like apple, grape, and watermelon. After carefully sketching in a trunk and lower-limb support, I reveled in scribbling rapid loops of black ink to fill in the thick curtains of drooping foliage.
Reading about the “Queen of the South, singing to herself in her lonely bower,” in Margaret Fuller’s 1841 short story, “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” brought back this childhood memory of fragrant tree sketching in the dark and in some way. I think my young self identified with the willow, finding a connection between the forlorn drooping branches and my own long wavy hair and frequent feelings of loneliness. Years later, this childhood pastime surfaced again in a moody analogous color study assignment for art school, merging me still more directly with my arboreal favorite.
The willow-girl within responded to Fuller’s “stately tower of verdure” long before my conscious-self figured out my intense attraction to the story.
For any who might be unfamiliar with Fuller, she was the only female member of the male intellectual circle known as the American Transcendentalists. When she was growing up in Boston, her father gave her a classical education more rigorous than some men received and denied to most women at the time. Fitted for intellectual projects typically reserved for men, yet by custom forced to inhabit the sphere of women, Fuller ended up straddling the two gender roles and breaking boundaries in both. She was a women’s rights advocate, abolitionist, and activist for social reform. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) was the first major feminist text to be published in the United States.
The story of the magnolia was first published in the transcendentalist journal, The Dial, and is one of Fuller’s understudied visionary essays that creatively applies the transcendentalist notion of using the language of nature to better understand ourselves. My selection of visual works and quotes for A Beauteous Tree seeks to highlight links between the transcendental themes in the enigmatic magnolia story and Fuller’s feminist writing, as well as examine moments in which those ideas appear in other feminist texts, in order to explore gender identity through nature. Considering gender in new ways helps us examine heterocentric norms while finding common ground. Fuller’s feminist and transcendentalist notions of fluidity and transformation offer a path toward a more holistic perspective on gender and reconsideration of what constitutes masculine and feminine gender aesthetics.
The magnolia tale begins with a gallant young man riding by a lake on horseback, when, catching an enticing fragrance on the air, he pulls up short, dismounts and goes in search of the source of the “exquisite and delicious” scent, which he refers to as “the voice” of the “poet of the lake.” There is a wonderful blurring of senses happening with smell producing not just song, but a delicate poetry in another language. 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. 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 old, 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 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 under-appreciated 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 (c. 1482), 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.” 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 lines and colors of his own existence.” This might seem to downplay the importance of the masculine element, relegating it to an organizational function. But rather than diminishing one over the other perhaps her true purpose seems to be demonstrating the ever present feminine within the masculine. The emphasis on feminine power gestures towards the uniquely creative act of childbirth.
The experience of creating—a work of art, a human life—transforms the creator; it connects us with our internal, inscrutable, feminine power. Lance Smith’s painting When I’m with You depicts their mother from memory, trawling for the maternal within the depths of consciousness—our minds are pregnant repositories of ideas and reverie. Fuller suggests every creation act is intrinsically gendered. A combination of masculine and feminine powers sculpt and shape the emerging form.
The talking magnolia tree chooses a form that expresses her personal and creative identity through leaves, scent, and blossom. That idea inspired the tree self-portraits of this exhibition which ask us to consider ourselves through lithe branches and budding limbs; the biology of human gender subsides, centering identity upon emotions and personality. There are brief glimpses of other plant beings in the story such as the “solemn pine,” the “religious lily,” and the “lonely dahlia”; the pairing of flora and emotion articulates identity through botanical forms and evades gender specificity. The magnolia story reminded me that part of myself is woven into the weeping limbs of the willow. Have you always felt an intuitive connection with a particular tree? What kind of tree are you?
Strong, beautiful, and independent, the magnolia encompasses Fuller’s ideal of feminine creativity. The lakeside poet bids the traveler farewell saying, “each star sees me purer, of deeper thought…I feel the Infinite possess me more and more” and she subsides into herself only to be found by others within “prayer,” within the “harmony” of poetry, within the “elemental power” of “mothers,” quintessence, incandescent “femality.”