Apocalyptic Feminism Adam Mickiewicz and Margaret Fuller

Apocalyptic Feminism: Adam Mickiewicz and Margaret FullerAuthor(s): Ursula PhillipsSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jan., 2009), pp. 1-38Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25479322 .

Accessed: 17/04/2013 13:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic andEast European Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 130.39.62.90 on Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:12:52 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mhra

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucl

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucl

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25479322?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


THE SLAVONIC

AND EAST EUROPEAN

REVIEW

Volume 87, Number 1 -January 2009

Apocalyptic Feminism: Adam

Mickiewicz and Margaret Fuller URSULA PHILLIPS

This article explores one aspect of the 'spiritual friendship'1 between the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) and the

American feminist writer and journalist Margaret Fuller (1810-50):

namely, their shared vision of Woman and her role in history.2 The views of the two authors had been shaped separately by the spiritual and literary inspirations they had in common before they met but, as I shall argue, these became further radicalized in Mickiewicz's case during the mid-i840s, arguably under Fuller's influence. Com

mentators have wondered about the 'extraordinary chemistry' between

them, to use Charles Capper's phrase,3 many seeming to view their

Ursula Phillips is Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL School of Slavonic and East

European Studies.

1 Jean-Charles Gille-Maisani, Adam Mickiewicz, poete nationale de la Pologne: Etude psychoana

lytique et caracterologique, Montreal and Paris, 1988, p. 600 ('une amitie spirituelle'). I believe this to be an accurate representation of the nature of the relationship. 2

This study was originally inspired by the topic set for my doctoral examination at the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (March 2006): 'Woman in

Romanticism'. I wish to express my gratitude to Marta Piwihska for suggesting I include

Margaret Fuller. I am also endebted to the three SEER reviewers who commented on the text, as well as to three other scholars who likewise offered their constructive criticism:

Roman Koropeckyj, Elzbieta Kislak and Grazyna Borkowska. I especially wish to express my gratitude to Roman Koropeckyj for allowing me to read the chapter of his forthcoming biography (Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic, Ithaca, NY, 2008) that covers Mickie wicz's break with Towianski in 1846 as well as his relationships with a number of women in the 1840s including Fuller, Ksawera Deybel, Konstancja Lubienska and Delfina Potocka.

3 Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic life. Volume 2: The Public Years, New

York, 2007, p. 319. Capper does not consult Polish sources except for Mickiewicz's letters to Fuller, which were written in French and are available in English. See Leopold Wellisz, The Friendship of Margaret Fuller d'Ossoli and Adam Mickiewicz, New York, 1947.



2 ADAM MIGKIEWIGZ AND MARGARET FULLER

attraction as a potential or actual romantic one, especially on Fuller's

part.4 Their precise feelings for each other will never be known. When Mickiewicz's letters to Fuller (the main basis for such speculations) are considered in the light of his other, contemporary relationships with women, it becomes doubtful as to whether this aspect is what

made it exceptional. My emphasis in this article will be on the common

intellectual and religious backgrounds, and on how Mickiewicz dis covered in Fuller not only the fullest embodiment of his spiritual ideals but also a model for their pragmatic transference from the predomi nantly spiritual domain into the social and political. However, this too

requires caution: because despite his grand statements about equality, and despite his obvious recognition of the qualities of individual women both in his personal relations and in the public sphere, he in fact did very little to advance the cause of women's liberation in prac tical terms. During the time when he was editor of the socialist news

paper La Tribune des Peuples (1848-49) and exercised a free hand in this

prominent public forum to write on many other progressive political questions, he did not write about this one.5 The impression enthusias

tically embraced by several American commentators that Mickiewicz was an activist on behalf of women's rights is thus somewhat exag

gerated. His conception of equality was essentially a spiritual and intel lectual one, and although it came to imply (especially under the impact of Fuller) also a social and political one, it did not materialize in any concrete programme in the political arena. After 1849, when the two

friends lost touch, and then Fuller's death in 1850, Mickiewicz does not mention it again. His style of 'feminism' was primarily messianic, futuristic, 'apocalyptic', closely linked to his Towianist spirituality.

'Apocalyptic feminism' is the term used by Donna Dickenson in her

biography of Fuller to characterize not only Fuller's feminism, but also that of Mickiewicz, and I trust its appropriateness will become clear

during the course of this article.6 It is not my intention to 'deconstruct' Mickiewicz according to methodologies inspired by late twentieth

century gender theory, but to examine his spiritual and political agenda for women in the 1840s. I use the word 'feminism' advisedly and in a general sense, to denote an approach that identifies ? and

4 See for instance, Joan Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse: A life of Margaret Fuller,

Amherst, NY, 1994, pp. 248-58, and Marta Zielinska, 'Tajemnica przyjazni z Margaret Fuller', in Zielinska (ed.), Tajemnice Mickiewicza, Warsaw, 1998 (hereafter, Tajemnica przyjazni), pp 63-78.

See his writings for the Tribune in Adam Mickiewicz, Dziela. Wydanie rocznicowe 1798

igg8, 17 vols, Warsaw, 1993-2005, 12, pp. 15-296. The paper's editors included the feminist

Pauline Roland, but Mickiewicz wrote on subjects other than women's emancipation. 6 Donna Dickenson, Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman's Life, Basingstoke, 1993, p. 182:

'Like Fuller herself, Mickiewicz subscribed to an apocalyptic feminism.'



URSULA PHILLIPS 3

aspires to eradicate ? discrimination on grounds of gender. Coined by Charles Fourier, the term has been widely applied to movements active

before the 1840s such as the Owenites and the Saint-Simonians.7 It is

essential to remember that the views of both Mickiewicz and Fuller on women (and not only on women) cannot be properly understood

outside the spiritual context, which in Mickiewicz's case governed all

his actions and pronouncements following his 'conversion' to Towian ism on 30 July 1841, despite his rift with Towianski in April 1846, or

in isolation from the revolutionary socialistic and messianic ideas promi nent in contemporary France.8 Mickiewicz enjoyed a close friendship at the College de France with Jules Michelet and was familiar with his Histoire de la Revolution frangaise, which began to appear in 1847.

Michelet was to write voluminously on the subject of woman, in much the same millenarian spirit as Mickiewicz wrote to Fuller.9

It is significant that the date of their initial meeting and Mickiewicz's first letter to Fuller (February 1847), in which he prophesies for her a

transforming role as an example to women in Poland, France and

America, coincides almost exactly with his more radical statements to the Towianist Circle of God; these also indicate a shift in emphasis from the exclusively Polish context of Mickiewicz's earlier comments

about women's emancipation to the universal, world stage. The fact that Mickiewicz at this time was closely involved with one of the Towianist women, Ksawera Deybel, and was also in regular correspon dence with his former lover and now good friend and benefactress, Konstancja Lubienska, signing himself off in affectionate terms, does not suggest that Fuller fulfilled any exceptional emotional or sexual role for him.10 Fuller, who put herself under Mickiewicz's 'spiritual guidance',11 was likewise radicalized politically, it could be argued, by

7 See Jane Rendell, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United

States, iy 80-1860, London, 1985, and Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, London, 1983.

See Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris, Cambridge, MA, 1962; Donald G. Charlton, Secular Religions in France 1815-1870, London, 1963; Frank Paul Bowman, Le Christ Romantique, Geneva, 1973, and Bowman, Le Christ des barricades, Paris, 1987. On the reception of

Utopian ideas by Polish thinkers, see Adam Sikora, Prorocy szcz^sliwych swiatow, Warsaw, 1982, and Andrzej Walicki, Mi^dzy jilozofiq, religiq i politykq,: Studia 0 mysli polskiej epoki romantyzmu, Warsaw, 1983. On feminist movements in France in this period, see Rendell, Origins of Modern Feminism, and Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth

Century, Albany, NY, 1984. 9Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution francaise (1847-53), L& fo ne (i860), La sorciere

(1862). 10 On Mickiewicz's relationship with Ksawera Deybel, see Krzysztof Rutkowski, 'Miejsce

Ksawery Deybel w rodzinie Mickiewiczow', in Marta Zielinska (ed.), Tajemnice Mickiewicza, Warsaw, 1998, pp. 29-62 (hereafter, 'Miejsce Ksawery'). For his correspondence with

Lubienska, see Mickiewicz, Dziela ijg8?igg8, vols 16-17. 11 Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse, p. 260.



4 ADAM MICKIEWICZ AND MARGARET FULLER

Mickiewicz's messianic politics ? and especially by his involvement in

the revolutionary events in Rome in 1848. Fuller's enthusiasm for the Polish poet and his support for Mazzini, whom she had already met and admired in London (October 1846), is evident not only in her private correspondence but in the dispatches she sent from Rome

during 1848-49 to the New York Daily Tribune.12 Both Mickiewicz and Fuller were established figures in their own

right before their meeting in Paris. Fuller had published in March 1845 her most famous and influential feminist work, Woman in the Nineteenth

Century. In 1846 a collection of her essays had appeared in London entitled Papers on Literature and Art. From December 1845 sê had been the literary editor of the New York Daily Tribune, continuing to send articles to the Tribune during her travels in Europe, which had commenced in the summer of 1846.13 Mickiewicz by this time had ceased to write major works of poetry. After the appearance of his long narrative poem Pan Tadeusz in 1834, he remained nevertheless a promi nent figure in the Polish emigration in Paris, not least because of his conversion in July 1841 to the messianic sect of Andrzej Towianski and his lectures at the College de France (December 1840-May 1844) in his

capacity as Chair of Slavic Literature. Aleksander Chodzko indicates in his diary that Fuller was familiar

with Mickiewicz's lectures.14 There is no document, such as a clear statement in a letter, to prove that Mickiewicz read Fuller's works,

although, along with Leopold Wellisz, I would argue on the basis of his letters to Fuller that he appears to have been familiar with at least Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Wellisz identified a connection with

Fuller's work in Mickiewicz's first letter to her (he believed the first line to be a paraphrase, 'and not an accidental one', of a sentence in

Fuller's Introduction to Woman)}5 My suggestion in this article is that he was indeed familiar with the text of Woman in the Nineteenth Century because of the coincidence of certain ideas, such as Fuller's exposition

12 Margaret Fuller, The Writings of Margaret Fuller, ed. Mason Wade, New York, 1941,

pp. 405-540, especially p. 452 (29 March 1848) and pp. 461-64 (19 April 1848) where

she mentions Mickiewicz and the Polish Legion. See also Margaret Fuller, 'These Sad But

Glorious Days': Dispatches from Europe 1846-1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco

Smith, New York, 1991, pp. 209-31 (pp. 212 and 222-24). On Fuller and Mazzini, see Fuller, Writings, pp. 439-47; Margaret Fuller, Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert N.

Hudspeth, 6 vols, Ithaca, NY, 1983-93, 4, pp. 240, 248-49; 5, pp. 196-98, 201-02, 210,

247-50, and 6, pp. 376-77, and Shirley Smith, 'Anglo-Saxon Women's View of Mazzini:

The Case of Margaret Fuller', Italian Culture, 10, 1992, pp. 85-96. On Mickiewicz and

Mazzini, see Anna Tylusinska-Kowalska, 'Wielcy Apostolowie wolnosci, Mickiewicz i

Mazzini: braterstwo idei i czynu', Przeglqd Humanistyczny, 49, 2005, 6, pp. 13-22. 13 For a full account of Fuller's movements, see Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Tears.

14 Wladyslaw Mickiewicz, Zywot Adama Mickiewicza, Poznan, 4 vols, 1890-95, 3, p. 452. 15 Wellisz, Friendship, p. 14.



URSULA PHILLIPS 5

of a feminine principle, that is her 'idea of woman' and her specific conception of 'virginity', which Mickiewicz refers to directly and even

questions in his correspondence with her, and which I shall address in more detail below.

Wellisz noticed their 'ideological bond', but without thoroughly investigating it, sixty years ago:

In her rebellion against the measurement of the rights of men and women with two different yardsticks, in her firm belief in women's abilities and

vocation, in the ideological foundation of her philosophical writings and in her conviction that mankind was capable of attaining new and higher levels of development, she saw eye to eye with Mickiewicz. Their view

points on most vital social problems also coincided. The concept of

both had grown out of a fusion of the principles of Christianity with those of mediaeval and contemporary mysticism

as well as progressive social

ideology.16

There was 'an astonishing similarity between the wording of her Credo formulated in 1842 as a synthesis of her religious and philosophical convictions and the utterances of Mickiewicz and Towianski in this

period'; 'a profound community of ideas on all questions, from the condition of woman to reincarnation'.17 Mickiewicz was familiar with The Dial, the Transcendentalist magazine initially edited by Fuller,

having encountered there Ralph Waldo Emerson's article, 'Man the

Reformer', that appeared in the April 1841 issue. Mickiewicz is credited with having introduced Emerson to a European audience when he referred to Emerson's article in his lecture of 21 February 1843.18 Mickie wicz translated several pieces of Emerson into French.19 It is possible he also read the earlier version of Woman, entitled The Great Lawsuit:

Man versus Men. Woman versus Women which appeared in The Dial in July 1843.20

16 Ibid., pp. 5-6. 17 Ibid., p. 14; Gille-Maisani, Adam Mickiewicz, p. 600: 'lis se sentirent en profonde

communaute d'idees sur toutes les questions, depuis la condition de la femme jusqu'a la reincarnation.' Translations in this article from French or Polish are my own unless otherwise stated.

18 Mickiewicz, Dziela ijg8-igg8, 10, pp. 143-44. On Emerson in Mickiewicz, see

Marta Skwara, 'Mickiewicz i Emerson - prelekcje paryskie', Pami^tnik Literacki, 85, 1994,

3, pp. 104-22, and Andrzej Walicki, 'Problematyka filozoficzna w mickiewiczowskich

prelekcjach paryskich', %nak, 1998, 12, pp. 80-99 (PP- 94"~99)- On Fuller and Emerson, see

Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Tears. 1

See Mickiewicz, Dziela ijg8-igg8, 13, pp. 345-464: 'L'Histoire', 'Confiance en soi.

Adaptation d'Emerson', 'L'homme religieux reformateur'. 20

The Dial, 1843, 4, pp. 1-48. For a useful comparison of the two versions, see Marie Mitchell Oelsen Urbanski, 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century: Genesis, Form, Tone, and Rhetorical Devices', in Urbanski (ed.), Margaret Fuller: Visionary of the New Age, Orono, ME, 1994, pp. 160-80. If Mickiewicz read either version, it must have been in English. There has never been a translation of Woman into Polish, and a French translation appeared only in 1988: Margaret Fuller, La femme au ige siecle, trans. Sylvie Chaput, Montreal, 1988.




Very few precise facts are known about the actual meetings between Mickiewicz and Fuller that took place in Paris and Italy between

February 1847 and May 1848: there are the references Fuller makes to them in letters to Emerson,21 to Marcus and Rebecca Spring,22 to

James F. Clarke,23 and to Giovanni Ossoli;24 the diary of Rebecca

Spring, to whom Fuller occasionally confided, and which is discussed, for example, in Joan Von Mehren's biography;25 and the brief record of Mickiewicz's son Wladyslaw Mickiewicz, who states that Mickiewicz 'was amazed not so much by her masculine [sic] erudition as by the

depth of her ideas and by what they had in common with his own

conceptions'.26 Wladyslaw includes the record of Mickiewicz's friend and fellow Towianist Aleksander Chodzko, who claims that Fuller was

drawn into the Towianist Circle of God and shared its ideas, and also

alleges that Mickiewicz made such a powerful impression on her that

she fainted on a sofa.27 Almost a century later Mickiewicz's letters to Fuller (ten in all) came to light in the Library of Harvard College, and were publicized independently of each other by Emma Detti28 and

by Wellisz.29 Fuller's letters to Mickiewicz have never been recovered,

perhaps destroyed by Wladyslaw Mickiewicz or by the poet himself.

Despite the rather scanty 'evidence', the nature of the relationship between Mickiewicz and Fuller has been the subject of ? sometimes

voyeuristic ?

speculation among researchers. Its study has fallen, at

least until very recendy, to two groups of scholars: on the one hand, the 'Mickiewiczologists' working in the field of Polish literary studies

and, on the other, American feminists keen to restore Fuller to what

they believe is her rightful place in the history of American feminism, literature and philosophy. All scholars who have looked at the

material agree that it was something special, their first encounter

'exceptional',30 though different interpretations have been put on this.

21 Fuller, Letters, 4, pp. 258-62; 5, pp. 55, 63-64. 22 Ibid., 4, pp. 262-64; 6, pp. 376-78. 23 Ibid., 5, pp. I73-76 24 Ibid., 5, pp. 124-26, 129-30. 25

Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse, pp. 257-58. 26 Wiadyslaw Mickiewicz, Zywot, 3, pp. 451-52.

27 Ibid., p. 452. The Chodzko passage, as quoted by Wiadyslaw Mickiewicz, is included

by Wellisz, Friendship, pp. 9-20, and Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Years, p. 318. See also

Aleksander Chodzko, 'Rozmowy z Adamem Mickiewiczem', in Mickiewicz, Dziela wszystkie.

Wydanie sejmowe, 16 vols, Warsaw, 1933-38, 16, pp. 203-44 (these are not included in Dziela

Emma Detti, Margaret Fuller Ossoli e i suoi correspondent, Florence, 1942. 29 Wellisz, Friendship. 30 Ibid., pp. 9-10.



URSULA PHILLIPS 7

Attempts to show whether or not they were in love,31 or whether Mickiewicz may have been the father of Fuller's illegitimate son (born September 1848),32 distract, however, from something more vital ?

more interesting to the history of ideas and of feminism ? which might broaden our understanding of Mickiewicz's thought after he ceased to write poetry. The American feminists (Donna Dickenson, Joan Von

Mehren, Marie Mitchell Oelsen Urbanski33 and Elaine Showalter34

among others) who have explored Fuller's intellectual background and social ideas in much more detail than the Polish scholars have perhaps come closer to appreciating the nature of Mickiewicz's impact on

Fuller, despite not being specialists on the Polish poet and his cultural

heritage. Any possible influence of Fuller on Mickiewicz, however, remains unexplored on their part.

Fuller was overlooked, in accordance with the general ignoring of women writers of the past, by the established Polish authorities on

Mickiewicz: Juliusz Kleiner, Waclaw Borowy, Konrad Gorski, Stanislaw

Pigoh, Wiktor Weintraub, Kazimierz Wyka. Likewise, in his more recent biography, Zbigniew Sudolski mentions only Chodzko's account of Fuller's faint, and her allegedly dreamy and depressive personality;35 otherwise his few references to the Fuller correspondence are included

only to track Mickiewicz's whereabouts in Italy. Similarly, another recent biographer, Tomasz Lubienski, emphasizes only Fuller's faint and her 'weakness' for Mickiewicz, except that he does make the

interesting observation that she belonged ?

along with certain French women attracted to Towianism ? to 'some new generation of Mick iewicz's female friends entirely from outside the Polish or wider Slavic circle'.36 Among other recent scholars of Polish literature, however,

31 Danilewiczowa notes the rumour, allegedly taken up by Emerson, that Mickiewicz was

planning to divorce his wife Celina and marry Fuller, but I am aware of no evidence for

this; see Maria Danilewiczowa, Pierscien z Herkulanum i plaszcz pokuty, London, i960, p. 79. Capper indicates that the suggestion was also made by Rebecca Spring: Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Tears, p. 333. Similarly, Manfred Kridl, 'Adam Mickiewicz and Margaret Fuller', in Kridl (ed.), Adam Mickiewicz, Poet of Poland: A Symposium, New York, 1951, p. 259: 'One is tempted to speculate whether Mickiewicz had not a more "earthly" interest in the attractive American than to convert her to his faith and help her to carry out her "mission".'

32 Zielifiska, Tajemnica przyjazni, pp. 63-78 (p. 74). Zielihska later has second thoughts about

her speculations that Mickiewicz may have been the father of Fuller's child, describing this as 'unlikely' ('hipoteza

- malo prawdopodobna'): see Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, Dorota

Siwicka, Alina Witkowska and Marta Zielinska, Mickiewicz: Encyklopedia, Warsaw, 2001, p. 158. 33

Marie Mitchell Oelsen Urbanski, Margaret Fuller's 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century': A

Literary Study of Form and Content, of Sources and Influence, Westport, CT, 1980. 34 Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage, New York, 2001,

PP-4i-6i. Zbigniew Sudolski, Mickiewicz: Opowiesc biograficzna, Warsaw, 1995, p. 646.

36Tomasz Lubiefiski, M jak Mickiewicz, Warsaw, 2005, pp. 198, 201-02.




Fuller's intellectual importance for Mickiewicz has been recognized, even if mentioned only briefly. Zielinska, although she focuses on their

personal attachment (and possible sexual involvement), nevertheless notes that 'To discuss what they had in common would require a

separate work'.37 Another recent Polish scholar, Marta Skwara, in her study of American Transcendentalism and its influence on Polish

writers, also points to the intellectual impact of this meeting of minds,

claiming that only Wellisz had earlier fully appreciated it; but she does not develop the theme herself.38 Likewise Ewa Kossak, in her study of the Towianist women, mentions the impact of Fuller on Mickiewicz, but this is not the focus of her study and she also does not develop it: 'She [Fuller] embodied the values he had once sought in Celina [his

wife] and in Ksawera [Deybel], in Delfina [Potocka] and Konstancja Lubienska. His meeting with such an unusual being sparked a real

eruption of new and holy formulations from Mickiewicz.'39 Fuller's relationship with Mickiewicz is discussed by Capper.40 Cap

per appreciates the common intellectual heritage and also implies, but does not precisely argue, that Mickiewicz was familiar with the text of

Woman, though I am somewhat doubtful as to whether Mickiewicz's interest in Fuller was so calculated: 'Mickiewicz had ferreted out all her favourite themes.'41 His first letter (or written address) to Fuller cer

tainly marks her out as in some way exclusive in terms of women's liberation and empowerment, and I shall return to this below, but I am

less convinced about any sustained exclusivity of personal interest on

Mickiewicz's part. His subsequent letters exude less of the provocative sexual piquancy that Capper suggests and more of the slightly patron izing

? yet intimate (and blunt)

? authority also characteristic of

his contemporaneous letters to Konstancja Lubienska (quoted below). Capper's reference to 'Mickiewicz's pro-women's rights circle', which

suggests that the Towianists were involved in some kind of proactive movement for women's emancipation, like the similar claim by Leopold Reynolds in his introduction to Fuller's essays ('Mickiewicz was also an ardent advocate of women's rights'), needs qualification and contextualization.42 The importance for Mickiewicz of the

friendship receives some attention from Roman Koropeckyj in his

forthcoming biography of Mickiewicz, where he suggests that alongside

George Sand and Marie d'Agoult, Margaret Fuller may also have had

37 Zielihska, Tajemnica przyjazni, p. 65. 38

Marta Skwara, Krqg transcendentalistow amerykanskich w literaturze pobkiej XIX i XX wieku:

Dzieje recepcji, idei i powinowactw z wyboru, Szczecin, 2004, pp. 61-67. 39 Ewa K. Kossak, Boskie diabfy, Warsaw, 1996, p. 289. 40 Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Years, pp. 316-19, 333-35, 376-77. * ibid., P. 319 Ibid., p. 318; Fuller, 'These Sad But Glorious Days', p. 13.



URSULA PHILLIPS 9

something to do with the new 'urgency' with which he approached the women's issue in the winter of 1846-47.

My focus here will be the texts by Mickiewicz where he directly addresses the women's question, either in a political or in a religious context, or in both: his lectures at the College de France of 17 June 1842 and 30 April 1844, his addresses to the Towianist Circle of

God in March 1847, his letters to Margaret Fuller written between 15 February 1847 an^ 9 September 1849, and t'ie List of Principles (Sklad zasad) of his Polish Legion (1848). I shall also consider briefly some

of his letters to Lubienska written during this same period, where he addresses a woman's personal and moral independence.

As to Fuller, the main text discussed here will be her best-known work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a lengthy treatise on the condition of contemporary woman as much from a spiritual, literary and philosophical perspective as from the social or political

? though

the latter is certainly a major part of it: the ills of contemporary marriage, prostitution, the inadequate education usually afforded to women and their subsequent lack of'self-reliance', their exclusion from the public sphere yet potential ability to undertake any profession or 'office', including that of'sea-captain, if you will', soldier or carpen ter,43 all this delivered in a literary style of engaged enthusiasm and

prophetic destiny. When she moved from New England to New York and took up her role as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, her social criticism became more pronounced, though the main themes had already been established in Woman. In addition to visiting pro stitutes in Sing Sing Prison, she became a defender of marginalized 'others' ? Indian Americans, Jews, Irish immigrants, to whose dis

advantaged positions her activism on behalf of her own sex must

surely have sensitized her.44 Her vision for woman was without question one of social action,

yet the ideal of the feminine on which it depends in Woman is one

prescribed by male spiritual mentors (Swedenborg, Goethe, Fourier

among others), that is it is one that seems readily to adopt the postula tions (elevated to the status of 'truths') that spring from the imagina tions of men, without questioning the stereotyping of women evident in such prescriptions. However, as some commentators have argued, including Joan von Mehren and Charles Capper, Fuller's conception

43 Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings, ed. Donna Dickenson,

Oxford, 1994, pp. 115-16. Further quotations from this edition will be indicated by page references in the text.

44 See Margaret A. Lukens, 'Columnist of Conscience: Margaret Fuller's New York

Years', in Urbanski, Visionary of the New Age, pp. 183-96, and dispatches in Fuller, Writings, and Fuller, 'These Sad But Glorious Days'.




of gender is rather an 'androgynous' one: 'in her most radical move, she posits that the core of "femality" is androgynous. The notion of a

bigender humanity and even divinity had been a strong undercurrent in hermetic thought from the Neoplatonists to Swedenborg, eventually flowing into German as well as later French social Romanticism.'45 Von Mehren suggests that Fuller's 'gender multiplicity' is linked to 'the theory of sexual identity that sprang from her concept of the

completely developed soul as without gender',46 which interestingly resonates with a claim made by Mickiewicz in one of his addresses to the Circle of God in March 1847 triat 'Women are called to equality; spirits do not have gender'.47 The Towianists, including Mickiewicz, referred to women as 'spirits in female shells' and addressed them as

'brother' or 'brethren'. Mickiewicz appears, at least on the surface, to share this idealized 'androgynous' vision of woman informed by similar

inspirations (Swedenborg, German and French Romanticism). Fuller sometimes detaches the cultural notions of femininity and

masculinity from individuals marked female or male biologically, there

by suggesting that in these instances she attached greater significance to the qualities than to their physical embodiments. She says: 'it is no more the order of nature that it [Femality] should be incarnated

pure in any form, than that the masculine energy should exist un

mingled with it in any form. 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' (p. 75). She

mentions Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, 'who like all men of

genius, shared the feminine development' (p. 74), which comes close to Mickiewicz's identification of the poet with the feminine voice in his much earlier poem Romantycznosc (Romanticism, 1822). The poet in

Romantycznosc rejects cold scientific reason and identifies with the extreme feeling of a young peasant woman who cannot accept her lover's death: 'Feeling and faith speak more powerfully to me/ Than the glass and eye of the philosopher [m^drca szkielko i oko] / [...]

Have a heart and look into the heart!' (lines 64-6C)).48 This famous

exhortation, which concludes what is generally regarded as a defining manifesto of Polish Romanticism, raises an important question about the poet's perception of himself. Does the poet identify himself as a

feminine voice? Jaroslaw Lawski, drawing on similar interpretations of

45 Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Tears, p. 118.

46 Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse, p. 168.

47 Adam Mickiewicz, 'Przemowienie dia Kola Leonarda Rettla 5 marca 1847', in

Mickiewicz, Dziela ijg8-igg8, 13, pp. 278-84 (p. 283). 48 Ibid., 1, pp. 55-57.



URSULA PHILLIPS II

Goethe, argues that Mickiewicz in this poem associates femininity with intuitive and superior powers of cognition, with seeing (like the poet) with 'the mind's eye' and having a more direct route to absolute truth.49 All this suggests that the male authorities on whom Fuller draws

also had an androgynous understanding of gender. In the case of both Fuller and Mickiewicz, however ? whether it be intentionally, consciously or despite themselves ? the material, bodily woman and the way she experiences the world also come into play, woman 'as a situation in the world'.50 Fuller writes about real women's actual life

experience, not just about the 'idea of woman', a feminine or female

principle. Towards the end of her treatise she claims that 'By being more a soul, she will not be less a woman' (p. 117). My own sense

is that there is a real live ? and unresolved ? tension between this

androgynous and a gynocentric approach to the world. Whilst Capper is

right to claim that for Fuller 'gender like religion is neither a fixed

category nor a meaningless social construct but a dynamic cognitive and relational sign of the metamorphosing soul of the universe', I am less convinced by his subsequent suggestion: 'Indeed, so dynamic is her

androgynous idea of gender that it would seem to preclude any gender program for women.'51 I cannot agree that her understanding of

gender is unproblematically 'androgynous'; yet neither is it driven by a consistent sense of an essential difference between the sexes. Sexual

identity, in other words, including that of the author herself, appears highly unstable. It is also my contention that when Mickiewicz speaks of the equality of women, even though he may speak of 'spirits' (duchy) as being without gender, he likewise does not transpose gender into an

androgynous spiritual 'beyond': he also takes account of the physical reality of embodied woman, both her potential for real action in the

public sphere, and her private needs. He follows the statement about

'spirits' not having gender with the following: 'they [spirits] are equal and called to actions appropriate to the differences in their organiza tion [sic]' which would seem, in fact, to be a recognition precisely of difference.52 But I am leaping ahead.

Several of the specific spiritual inspirations mentioned in Woman, and whom Fuller treats as authorities in her promotion of woman's

spiritual capacities and hence in justification of her claims for equality,

49Jaroslaw Lawski, Marie romantykow. Metafizyczne wizje kobiecosci: Mickiewicz-Malczewski Krasinski, Bialystok, 2003, pp. 20, 85-90. The gender dimension is also discussed by Zofia

Stefanowska, 'O "Romantycznosci"', in Stefanowska, Proba zdrowego rozumu, Warsaw, 1976,

Simone de Beauvoir's formulation, discussed in Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays, Oxford, 1999, pp. 59-72. 51

Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Tears, pp. 118-19. Capper is discussing here the earlier version (The Great Lawsuit), but these passages are unchanged in Woman.

52 Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-iggg, 13, p. 283.




map onto those that contributed to Mickiewicz's intellectual and

religious formation, including Joseph de Maistre (1755-1821), Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Jacob Boehme (1575?1624), Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), and the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).53 Fuller mentions all these, but her chief three are Swedenborg, Goethe, and the French political philosopher and

Utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837).54 An additional, major influence on Mickiewicz's religious formation and attitude to official Catholicism was Felicite de Lamennais (1782-1854). Fuller encountered Lamennais in Paris before she met Mickiewicz and commented favour

ably on his newspaper L'Avenir,55 but she does not mention him in Woman as significant to the development of her own ideas.

Fuller speaks of Swedenborg, Fourier and Goethe as her chief

inspirations for establishing a female model ('a self-possessed, wise and graceful womanhood', p. 79) sympathetic to the changing role of woman in contemporary life: 'One of prominent interest is the unison of three male minds, upon the subject, which, for width of culture, power of self-concentration and dignity of aim, take rank as the

prophets of the coming age':

Swedenborg came, he tells us, to interpret the past revelation and unfold a new. He announces the new church that is to prepare the way for the New Jerusalem [...]. His idea of woman is sufficiently large and noble to

interpose no obstacle to her progress. His idea of marriage is consequendy sufficient. Man and woman share an angelic ministry, the union is from one to one, permanent and pure.

As the New Church extends its ranks, the needs of woman must be more considered. [...]

As aposde of the new order, of the social fabric that is to rise from love, and supersede the old that was based on strife, Charles Fourier comes next,

expressing, in an outward order, many facts of which Swedenborg saw the

secret springs. [...] He was a stranger to the highest experiences. His eye was fixed more on the outward needs of man. Yet he, too, was a seer of

the divine order [...]. He has filled one department of instruction for the new era [...]

He too places woman on an entire equality with man, and wishes to

give to one as to the other that independence which must result from intellectual and practical development. [...]

The object of Fourier was to give her the needed means of self help, that she might dignify and unfold her life for her own happiness and that of

society, (pp. 79-81)56

53 Fuller, Woman, pp. 66, 71, 79-85. 54 Ibid, pp. 80-81.

55 Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Tears, pp. 313-16. 56 The Transcendentalists' experiment at Brooke Farm was inspired by Fourier's

phalanx.



URSULA PHILLIPS 13

I agree with Marie Urbanski when she describes Woman, despite its

social concerns, as first and foremost a religious work, a product of New England Transcendentalism of the late 1830s and early 1840s,57 distinguished above all by what Urbanski calls its 'revolutionary

spiritualism', the feature that separates Fuller from other, more politi cally oriented contemporary feminists (such as Fanny Wright or the

anti-slavery women).58 Urbanski demonstrates how the work, con

sidered by some critics as 'incoherent and rambling',59 is structured as a sermon, for which the key text is Matthew 5, verse 48: 'Be ye perfect'

(pp. 7-8).60 Although this is a call to both men and women, in Woman

the focus is on women. The tone is 'didactic' and 'hortatory', and also has elements of the classical oratio. The applicatio of the sermon is

that women must act to save themselves, a sentiment in tune with

Emerson's exhortations of self-reliance or self-culture. Urbanski shows how the work is informed not only by Transcendentalist spiritual and ethical concerns, but also their theory of art, where the overwhelming emphasis is on the individual, on subjective experience, on the author

ity of intuition, where the basic assumption is 'the superiority of the

spirit to the letter',61 an approach with which Mickiewicz had much in

common, especially by the 1840s. Mickiewicz does not allude to the same spiritual icons as Fuller in

the context of women's emancipation as such, yet it is significant that he promotes them in broader terms, because they expressed unconven

tional (that is non-doctrinal with regard to the traditional theology of the official, established Church) ideas about many aspects of religious life. In some of his own renderings of these mystical thinkers, Mickie

wicz comments, for example, on the ideal spiritual marriage: 'Man is the spirit of woman, woman is the soul of man and everything unites in joint leadership [w spolnym wodzu]; there woman ties herself to

pure spirit, and man finds a pure soul. This is true marriage' (Louis de

Saint-Martin); or on 'original' human 'androgyny', woman's 'genesis' and 'divinity' (Boehme). He does so, however, without directly asserting any specific agenda other than to indicate, by the very act of selecting them, that such issues were of interest to him.62

57 Urbanski, Fuller's Woman, pp. 97-127. See also David M. Robinson, 'Transcendentalism

and Its Times', in Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 13-29. 58

Urbanski, Fuller's Woman, p. 124. 59 Showaiter, Inventing Herself, p. 53. 60 Urbanski, Fuller's Woman, pp. 128-45.

Il Ibid, pp. 134-35. See Mickiewicz's translations of Saint-Martin in Dziela iyg8-igg8, 13, pp. 341-44

(p. 342), and essay Jakub Boehme' (1853) in ibid, pp. 465-85 (pp. 475-76, 480-81, 484).




Mickiewicz discovered Boehme through the works of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803) whom he read when he was in exile in Russia (1824-29).63 Although his Boehme essay was much later (1853), these two as well as another mystic Angelus Silesius (Johann Scheffler,

1624-77) were already of considerable importance to Mickiewicz's

spiritual formation by the mid-1830s when he compiled his Apothegms and Sayings (?dania i uwagi), the subtitle of which is: 'From the Works of

Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius and Saint-Martin5 ('Z dziel Jakuba Bema, Aniola Sl^zaka i S^-Martena').64 Aleksander Chodzko records Mickiewicz as having said, in 1852, of these two mystics and of

Swedenborg: Of the modern mystics, the greatest is Boehme, a soul burning with a great, pure flame and painting its visions with fiery words. He is also a Divine

prophet and a seer for the Christian people of today just as Isaiah was for the Hebrews.

Second after Boehme is Swedenborg, but he is neither so purely nor so

deeply initiated into the world of the spirit. He sometimes has great visions, more often lesser ones.

Saint-Martin understood Boehme well; he dwelt among sceptics, Voltaire, Rousseau, at a most difficult time for believers [that is during the

Age of Reason ? UP], and is the third prophet.65

In discussing Goethe, her third 'guru', Fuller is most in her element. Her knowledge of German literature and acquaintance with Goethe's

texts, many of which she translated, was phenomenal;66 and she played a key role in spreading the appreciation of German culture in the United States, including the music of Beethoven: was his Immortal

63 Mickiewicz: Encyklopedia, pp. 479-81 (Saint-Martin), pp. 49-50 (Boehme). On the possible

significance of Saint-Martin for Fuller, see Jeffrey Steele, 'Margaret Fuller's Rhetoric of Transformation', in Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century: An Authoritative

Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Larry J. Reynolds, New York and London, 1998 (hereafter, 'Rhetoric of Transformation'), pp. 278-97 (pp. 293-94). She does not mention Saint-Martin

directiy in Woman.

^Mickiewicz: Encyklopedia, pp. 621-23. Apothegms and Sayings is Koropeckyj's translation of

the title. A detailed discussion is beyond the scope of the present article; for a good analy sis, see Michel Maslowski, 'Notes et pensees (Zdania i uwagi) d'Adam Mickiewicz: sagesse et

solitude', in Maria Delaperierre (ed.), Mickiewicz par lui-meme, Paris, 2000, pp. 35-53. See

also Andrzej Lam, 'Metryki Z^ i uwag Adama Mickiewicza wykazujacych podobienstwo do epigramatow Aniola Slazaka', Pami^tnik Literacki, 99, 2008, 1, pp. 145-70, and Andrzej Fabianowski and Ewa Hoffmann-Piotrowska (eds), Mickiewicz mistyczny, Warsaw, 2005, which contains several essays on Zdania i uwagi and on Boehme.

65 Mickiewicz, Dziela wszystkie, 16, p. 241. 66 See Renate Delphendahl, 'Margaret Fuller: Interpreter and Translator of German

Literature', in Urbanski, Visionary of the New Age, pp. 54-100; also Arthur R. Schultz,

'Margaret Fuller ?

Transcendentalist Interpreter of German Literature', in Joel Myerson (ed.), Critical Essays on Margaret Fuller, Boston, MA, 1980, pp. 195-208, and Henry A.

Pochman, 'Margaret Fuller and Germany', in ibid, pp. 228-46.



URSULA PHILLIPS 15

Beloved another prototype of the feminine which appealed to Fuller?67 She emphasizes the 'redeeming power' of the female in Faust 'In Faust, we see the redeeming power, which, at present, upholds woman, while

waiting for a better day, in Margaret [sic]. To the Mater Dolorosa she appeals for aid. [...] In the second part, the intellectual man, after his manifold strivings, owes to the interposition of her whom he had betrayed his salvation. She intercedes, this time herself a glorified spirit, with the Mater Gloriosd (Fuller's emphases, spelling and punc tuation, p. 82). Hence the female saviour not only herself represents a

salutary principle, but has the power to intercede with the ultimate

redeeming principle: the Mother of God. Fuller refers here of course to Goethe's 'eternal feminine' which Lawski identifies as the overriding feminine principle underlying all Mickiewicz's female figures up to and

including those in Pan Tadeusz (1834). Fuller refers to other heroines of Goethe, such as Leonora and

Iphigenia, but it is to the female figures in Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (1821) and Wanderjahre (1829) that srie 'would especially refer' (p. 83).

Wilhelm's progress to maturity and wisdom is populated by a series of feminine types or embodiments of the feminine by means of which he is initiated into different aspects of experience and knowledge: 'In all these expressions of woman', she says, 'the aim of Goethe is satisfac

tory to me. He aims at a pure self-subsistence, and free development of any powers with which they may be gifted by nature as much for them as for men' (p. 84). Fuller identifies two in particular, as the ones

she finds most acceptable: Mignon and Macaria. Macaria, 'the soul of a star, i.e. pure and perfected intelligence embodied in feminine form', is the last (and highest) stage in Wilhelm's initiation: 'She instructs him in the archives of a rich human history, and introduces him to the

contemplation of the heavens. [...] In the Macaria, bound with the

heavenly bodies in fixed revolutions, the centre of all relations, her unrelated [my emphasis; here Fuller means: unattached, virgin

? UP],

he expresses the Minerva side of feminine nature' (pp. 83-84). But it is not only the 'Minerva side' that Fuller believes is important. She also identifies another of Goethe's female types in Wilhelm Meister as crucial to the definition of female nature: Mignon, 'the finest expression ever

yet given to what I have called the lyrical element in woman' (p. 83); 'Mignon is the electrical, inspired, lyrical nature' (p. 84). Here we have the origins and prototypes of Fuller's two 'sides' to female nature, or

67 See Ora Frishberg Salomon, 'Margaret Fuller on Beethoven in America, 1839-1846',

The Journal of Musicology, 1992, Winter, pp. 89-105. Towiahski identified Beethoven as a

uniquely inspired Christian prophet who would be fully understood only in the 'distant

future'; see Andrzej Towiahski, Wybor pism i nauk, ed. Stanislaw Pigoh, Wroclaw, 2004, pp. 244-47.



l6 ADAM MICKIEWICZ AND MARGARET FULLER

'Femality', as she calls it (which is a much more neutral term than the

culturally loaded 'femininity'?): 'There are two aspects of woman's

nature, represented by the ancients as Muse and Minerva' (p. 74).68 I find it impossible to reconcile, pace Capper et al., such an exposition of

specifically female nature with the notion of 'androgyny': Fuller must

herself have had wavering views on the subject. But it is 'only in the present crisis', she suggests, 'that the preference

is given to Minerva' (women need to become self-sufficient and learn the 'powers' of 'continence' and 'self-poise'

? so as to be taken

seriously by patriarchal society); ultimately, Fuller does not appear to

favour this model, but the Muse, recognizing that the Muse's time has not yet come: 'The especial genius of woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency. [...] What I

mean by the Muse is the unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonition of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being. It may appear as prophecy or as poesy' (pp. 75-77). Moreover she associates the

'mystical' and 'spiritual' with the feminine: 'The spiritual tendency is towards the elevation of woman, but the intellectual by itself is not so

[...]. But the intellect, cold, is ever more masculine than feminine;

[...] The electrical, the magnetic element in woman has not been

fairly brought out at any period. Everything might be expected from

it; she has far more of it than man' (p. 66). Minerva and the Muse are

not opposites, however; they should not be regarded as the poles of a binary opposition; rather they reveal two different aspects of one

nature. Minerva has to be educated and developed, but the Muse is

innate, God-given (and hence by implication essential and assumed to

be common to all women). It is not my intention here to analyse images of women in Mickie

wicz's poetical production, that is in his work prior to 1841 and his conversion to Towianism. Lawski's analysis of the coincidence with, and potential influence of, Goethe in his general conception of woman,

however, is worth noting since it has much in common with Goethe as

portrayed by Fuller. Lawski makes a case for what he believes is the

overriding vision of femininity contained in Mickiewicz's poetical work:

namely the model of the 'eternal feminine', Goethe's das Ewig-Weibliche, the intercessor between earthly man (sicl the 'salvation' of woman does not feature) and the Transcendental, a topos of European Romanticism

that grew out of both Christian and Platonic thought, but acquired additional characteristics in the Polish poets, as a result of the Poles'

68 The tide of Von Mehren's biography; see also Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse,

p. 168.



URSULA PHILLIPS 17

specific historical and 'psycho-spiritual' situation, although, Lawski

insists, the national-patriotic narrative is subordinate in Mickiewicz to this more universal conception of woman's role in the Divine plan and in cultural history. Hence the images of ideal salvational women

(Zosia, for instance, in Pan Tadeusz) functioning more on the symbolic level than the level of the plot

? as collective saviours of nations and of humankind, not merely as saviours of male scholar-poets. Interpret ed in this philosophical-cultural context, the dramatic role of such an

apparently insignificant figure as Ewa, the maiden at prayer in Diiady (Forefathers' Eve) Part III who sees in her mind's eye the young poet messiah on his way to Siberian exile, and who is judged by some

critics to be an infantile irrelevance,69 acquires a stature not usually ascribed to her. She has more in common with Mickiewicz's prophetic formulations of the 1840s than may be immediately apparent, suggest ing an ideological continuity between these 'embryonic' models and the 'saviour' Mickiewicz would later perceive in Fuller.70

The model of female patriotism that Mickiewicz portrays in the narrative poem Grazyna (1823) and in the well-known short poem Smierc

puffcownika (The Colonel's Death, 1832) depends, however, on total sacrifice of a woman's subjectivity for the patriotic cause in support of or in

place of men. The clearest example (however factually inaccurate) of

transgressing the gender boundary is Mickiewicz's portrayal in the

poem Smierc pulkownika of Emilia Plater, soldier-heroine of the 1830-31 insurrection in Lithuania, later eulogized by Fuller in Woman.11 Such heroines already had precedents in Polish history and literature, as Maria Janion explains,72 but in the early 1830s, portrayed by

Mickiewicz against the background of the tragedy of the 1830-31

69 Lawski, Marie romantykow, pp. 224-45. Lawski quotes the critics Waclaw Borowy and

Jan Wale. 70

Koropeckyj observes in addition that Ewa is an androgynous figure, referred to by the choir of angels as 'braciszek' (little brother) and 'kochanek' (an exclusively male lover); see Roman Koropeckyj, The Poetics of Revitalization: Adam Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve, Part 3 and Pan Tadeusz, Boulder, CO, 2001, pp. 51-52. The scene with Ewa appears as Scene IV of the drama, though in Mickiewicz's original order it probably came after and not before Father Piotr's prophetic vision (now Scene V); ibid, p. 80.

71 Fuller, Woman, pp. 25-27, 116. Fuller's use of this exceptional Polish aristocratic woman

as an example to encourage American women 'to challenge patriarchal norms and to participate in public life' is, however, problematic as a feminist model. See Halina

Filipowicz, 'The Wounds of History: Gender Studies and Polish Particularism', in Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (eds), Poles Apart: Women in Modern Polish Culture, Indiana Slavic

Studies, 15, 2005, pp. 147-67 (pp. 160-61). Fuller was not the first American woman writer to eulogize Plater, but Lydia Maria Child in her History of the Condition of Women (1838):

Urbanski, Woman, p. 87. On Emilia Plater as a model of female patriotic behaviour in several Polish literary texts, see Halina Filipowicz, 'The Daughters of Emilia Plater', in Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester (eds), Engendering Slavic Literatures, Bloomington and

Indianapolis, 1996, pp. 34-57. 72 Maria Janion, Kobiety i duch innosci, Warsaw, 1996, pp. 78-99 (pp. 79-81).



l8 ADAM MICKIEWICZ AND MARGARET FULLER

November Uprising, they acquired symbolic and even mystical value as emblems of a feminine courage exclusive to Polish women.

Most important in this context is the lecture Mickiewicz gave at the

College de France on 17 June 1842 (Lecture 30 of Course Two), where he discusses Antoni Malczewski's narrative poem Maria (1825), another of the works scrutinized by Lawski, and describes the eponymous heroine as the 'ideal Polish woman'. This is one of the occasions when

Mickiewicz refers directly to female emancipation, and concludes that 'the great question of women's liberation is significandy more advanced in Poland than in any other country'.73 This 'liberation' is entirely dependent on self-sacrifice, however, not on rights: 'In this Polish woman has liberated herself; here she has greater freedom than any where else, she is more respected, feels herself to be man's companion [towarzyszkq mqzczyzny]. Not by insisting on women's rights, not

by proclaiming imaginary [sic: urojone] theories will women achieve

importance in society, but by sacrifice [ofiara].' He uses the example of Malczewski's Maria to depict his ideal type: 'a daughter bound to her

father, a wife ready to follow her husband into the fire.' He claims that

during the 1830 uprising several such women emerged and specifically mentions Emilia Plater and Klaudyna Potocka. He lists the activities to

be emulated and admired: 'In Poland a woman takes part in conspira cies together with her husband and brothers, risks her life to bring help to prisoners, is sometimes condemned as a traitor to the state, is sent to Siberia.' According to Janion, 'Advancement in this matter

[emancipation] hinges on the fact that Polish women should be active not in order to liberate themselves, but to sacrifice themselves. Sacrifice sanctions the right to freedom. Transgressing beyond women's domestic role is not so much a transgression, as a moral adjustment to historical

circumstances'.74 We should note, however, that for Mickiewicz 'sacrifice' was a gesture incumbent upon all Polish patriots and thus transcended gender.

The heroic-patriotic model of female behaviour sanctioned in this lecture, and which appears in Mickiewicz's earlier poetry, is a sub

category, however, of a more general symbolic conception of woman; as Lawski argues, Mickiewicz's women fit a more universal model: the Romantic poet's own quest for so-called 'real' womanhood. The patri otic element is therefore subordinated to Mickiewicz's more general search for eternal femininity. Lawski claims that the perceptions of

nineteenth-century critics have distorted Mickiewicz's views on women

by giving unwarranted emphasis to his patriotic heroines:

73 Mickiewicz, Dziela ijg8-igg8, 9, pp. 385-86.

74Janion, Kobiety, p. 96; her emphases.



URSULA PHILLIPS ig

It is a strange paradox that despite everything, these two ideals existed

alongside one another. One that had an activist dimension (the Polish female patriot) and another that had an exotic, contemplative, ideal dimen sion (woman as the symbol of the spiritual dimension). [...] The fact that neither in Malczewski, nor in Mickiewicz or Slowacki the 'patriotic' paradigm entirely dominated their poetic achievements, may come as a

surprise. Even more impor tant is the fact that it dwells in the shadow of those extended poetic images of angels, female devils (diablice), madonnas, morning stars (jutrzenki).

Hence literature, one may assume, preserved for itself that deeper look at the 'feminine element' not connected or not only connected with the

patriotic-insurrectionist calling of Polish Woman.75

This analysis is persuasive since such a universal conception of

woman, allegedly present in Mickiewicz's earlier (poetic) work, would seem to have prepared the ground for his stance in the 1840s, when he

became, as Walicki puts it, a 'universalistic religious thinker [...] a

revolutionary Francophile, every inch a European thinker'.76 Lawski descibes Mickiewicz's vision of woman and femininity as

both 'mystical' and 'metaphysical' (he does not make a clear distinction between these), or 'symbolic' of the spiritual dimension to life (that is

'eternal', outside time), conscientiously eschewing the sociological, as he seems to believe Mickiewicz also did. Crucial to this conception of woman is the whole gamut of associations inspired by Mary the

Mother of God and a range of other Marys, 'Marian' conceptions and

mother-figures, accumulated not only in religious thought but also, and

perhaps just as importantly as far as Mickiewicz was concerned, in

literary works.77 It would seem to be a consistent, stable and immutable ideal of femininity, not contingent on an historical or sociological context, which Lawski calls an 'archetype'.78 Emerging from this is the further point that the 'mystical' and 'metaphysical' seem to be themselves interpreted as marks of the feminine ? this in addition to the 'superior' powers of intuition and cognition already ascribed to

women in Romantycznosc. This is an interesting idea, especially when we carry it forward into a reading of Mickiewicz's formulations of the 1840s, such as his letters to Fuller, where he speaks of the role of

women in the salvation of the world, all couched in the mystical tones and vocabulary of Towianist-speak.

During the mid-1840s Mickiewicz expressed views that were a radi cal advance on the limited version of 'liberation' he had idealized in a

specifically Polish context, granting women first the right to priesthood

75 Lawski, Marie romantykow, p. 22.

76 Andrzej Walicki, Mesjanizm Adama Mickiewicza w perspektywie porownawczej, Warsaw, 2006,

pp 11-12.

Lawski, Marie romantykow, pp. 264-84. 78 Ibid., p. 26.




and then 'equal rights in all things'. What is interesting, however, is that he initially posits a predominandy spiritual role for women, only becoming more socially committed at about the same time as he met Fuller (February 1847), and/or, I suspect, read her book. In another Lecture (12 of Course Four), dated 30 April 1844, he is still talking about the predominandy spiritual and patriotic orientation of women

(there is no mention here of their own subjectivity, social rights or

sexual liberation): In the middle ages a woman prayed in her domestic chapel for the same cause as her husband fought on the batdefield. [...] This state of affairs still exists in Poland where a woman enters conspiracies, accompanies her

husband to Siberia, and sometimes defends her country on horseback. There families still strive to live the great life of the nation. This is already lacking in the other great countries of Europe. Let no one say that woman

continues to desire the care of a priest out of love for the past or in order to avoid the serious tasks of life today. In the early centuries of Christian

ity women did not fear the seriousness of this religion and did not stub

bornly keep the counsels of the pagan priests: in Christianity they guessed through feeling a higher and stronger life. Today that same feeling warns them that they have nothing to expect from philosophical and social

systems [...]. The spirit of woman, like the spirit of one of the common people [lud\,

irrespective of her personal occupations, sometimes needs to breathe with

a full breast the great life of religion and the nation. That life is created and maintained by great deeds. Is it imaginable that a woman would cast aside her golden altar and abandon the preacher, in order to go and listen to social projects, speculative reflections, academic speeches? And who

would suppose for a moment that the common people would deny its

respect to great people in order to worship great theories? [.. .] Not in this way will women and the common people be torn from the

past. There is only one way to overcome the past and that is to confront

it with the equally true present, at once more powerful and more glorious: to replace the ideal of the early Church and the ideal of the middle ages with the ideal of modern times [ideakm czasow nowozytnych].79

But on 4 and 5 March 1847 (note that the dates coincide with the initial letters Mickiewicz wrote to Fuller, between 15 February and the end

of March 1847) Mickiewicz made addresses to the Circle of God in

which he raised the topic of women in the 'church' (here, not just a

reference to Roman Catholicism but to the wider 'church' ? including the Towianists themselves). As a kind of postscript to his own conclu

sions (the treatment of Mickiewicz in his book otherwise concludes with

Pan Tadeusz), Lawski quotes a long passage from the first of these (4

March), where Mickiewicz confers priesthood on women, describing

79 Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, n, pp. 147-60 (pp. 159-60).



URSULA PHILLIPS 21

Mickiewicz as a 'mystical feminist'.80 Lawski insists that this is a purely 'spiritual priesthood' ('duchowe kaplanstwo kobiet'), not a sociological or historically contextualized call for the emancipation of women:

'Mickiewicz thinks of humanity, including nineteenth-century women

in categories of mystical cooperation, living in a desirable and perfect unity with men, and with whom women share common rights and duties ? understood however in a "spiritual" and not societal,

professional etc. way.'81 This conclusion is open to question when we look at the texts

themselves, where Mickiewicz clearly integrates contemporary society into his postulations. Lawski also identifies at this point a list of

contemporary thinkers of whom Mickiewicz would have been aware

and who would have turned his thoughts to the 'place of the new women of the near future': 'Saint-Martin and Saint-Simon, Fourier and Considerant, Thoreau or Emerson' (he mentions the latter but not the third member of the American Transcendentalist triad: Margaret Fuller). However, these thinkers were as political as they were religious, combining in the Utopian spirit of the day the earthly and the transcen dental in visions of societal and political renewal (the rhetoric of a new world order, the 'new era' and the regeneration of mankind, the Christianization of politics, claims of 'brotherhood' and 'equality'), in which women would play a key role. Mickiewicz's statements at this time subscribe to exactly such a vision; his 'priesthood' for women was not merely a spiritual exercise in support of men, but a vision of what women could be in society and in the world, irrespective of whether or not he actually did anything practical to make this happen.

On 4 March Mickiewicz opens by claiming that the official (Roman Catholic) Church had become a mere administrative organization (a 'bureaucracy' in today's parlance) eager to maintain its own control,

by marginalizing more genuine spiritual gifts (which the official Church considered dangerous to its authority); the Church marginalized such

gifts by shutting them away in religious orders and monasteries, and was thus able to tolerate them, as their influence became marginalized. 'What I said about the Church', he continues, 'also illuminates the

question of the second half of the human race: women.'82 He describes the marginalized spirituality of 'Israelite woman' in Old Testament times ('the youngest boy would blossom in all the delights of the

spiritual world, while a very small part of it was revealed to woman', p. 273) and contrasts this with the new revelation of Jesus: Jesus Christ

80 Lawski, Marie romantykow, pp. 717-21. *' ibid., P. 719.

Mickiewicz, 'Przemowienie do Braci 4 marca 1847', in Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, 13, pp. 271-77 (p. 273). Further page references will be given in the text.




indicated the whole freedom of woman; he went about surrounded by women: a new and unheard of thing in Israel. He gave the Samaritan woman [at the well] his word to Samaria; taking a drink of water, he celebrated with her a banquet. This freedom has been stifled by squeezing the spirit of Christ into the tight controls of the Church of

Rome' (pp. 273-74).83 In referring to the Samaritan woman,84 Mickiewicz anticipates the

classic arguments of certain contemporary women writers85 as well as

present-day feminist theologians.86 Like the latter, he also puts blame on the interpretations of Paul: 'Saint Paul raised the significance of woman somewhat above that of the Old Testament, but always with the idea of her as an administrator [administratorka]

? he did not dare

give her all prerogatives. The epoch had not arrived for this. One should know that not everything that the aposdes wrote came from the

spirit of God. Only that which Christ said is of God' (p. 274). He claims that such 'suppression of gifts in the Church, just like the slavery [niewola] of women' stems from the fact that the Church has lost its

ability to 'distinguish attributes [cechyY:

Only he who himself has the gift of prophecy can evaluate and endorse it

[Mickiewicz implies himself here?]; only he can respect a woman's higher calling who can sense the importance of that calling in society [my emphasis ?

UP]. What is considered today to be the highest thing in a woman? She is praised for being a good administrator, a well-organized housewife. Yet it is only pure, God-fearing people who lift up these qualities; for the earth has sunk even lower: it worships female charms, attractions. If then the most impoverished type is regarded as the universal one, what kind of

significance can the gift of prophecy have, or the gift of mercy, or another

similar gift? Such gifts cannot free themselves and soar except through the

people in whom they unfold. Woman must have support either in the

priesthood of men, or in her own priests, (p. 274)87

Mickiewicz's implication is that the gifts of women have gone unrecog nized and that the world is poorer for it. By channelling the energies

83 Note the use of'banquet' (biesiada). Biesiada (1841) was the title of Andrzej Towiahski's

first exposition of his doctrine.

84John 4: 1-42. 85 See Grazyna Borkowska, Alienated Women: A Study on Polish Women's Fiction i84j-igi8,

trans. Ursula Phillips, Budapest and New York, 2001, pp. 129-88, and Narcyza Zmichowska,

Listy. Tom V: Narcyssa i Wanda, ed. Barbara Winklowa and Helena Zytkowicz, Warsaw, 2007,

p. 88. 86

The significance for women's equality of Christ's conversation with the woman of

Samaria is discussed, for example, by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A

Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, 2nd edn, London, 1995, pp. 326-29, and

Deborah F. Sawyer, God, Gender and the Bible, London, 2002, pp. 108-13. 87 Mickiewicz uses the feminine grammatical form here, 'w swoich kaplankach', so there

can be no doubt about his intentions.



URSULA PHILLIPS 23

of women into lesser activities, their prophetic calling has been

bypassed (but now their time is imminent): The administrative type is the most convenient to man. We can see how

in primitive peoples, the woman ploughs, labours, does everything; man

goes to war or sleeps. War is for him the only way of liberating his spirit; having done it, he does not want to do anything else! Israel too, soaring in the spirit, off-loaded the entire share of earthly toil onto woman. Yet it is not the calling of woman to be only a domestic servant.

And here he cites the preference Christ showed to Magdalena [sic] over Martha, to the one who 'felt the word of God' over the one who busied herself about the kitchen.88 He tells the Circle that they must 'Ask God to give us in the Circle a woman priest [kaplanka]' recognizing at the same time that such 'freedom brings great responsibilities' (P- 275)

This passage about women concludes with a reference to the French Revolution and how it inspired women 'suddenly [to] take freedom', but that ? contrary to popular thinking

? their role was not initially violent or irresponsible: 'they were not, as is claimed, monsters and harlots' (pp. 275-76). Here he draws on the positive portrait of revolu

tionary women in Michelet's Histoire de la Revolution frangaise. I find it hard to believe that Mickiewicz intended all this to be purely 'mystical'. Although it undoubtedly has a mystical connection, he clearly refers to the role of historical and contemporary women in the family and in social life, as well as to their historical destiny.

The next day (5 March), Mickiewicz made another address. Here he

speaks again of the prophetic role of women and of the significance of the present epoch in the renewal of the world. Whilst his statements

have a universal application, he specifically addresses Polish women and calls again on the examples of Emilia Plater and Klaudyna Potocka; but whereas before these were regarded as Polish patriots making sacrifices for a specifically national cause, now Polish women are called to play a key role along with Poland as a nation, France and the Jews (the three chosen nations in Mickiewicz's 'prophetic' references both in these addresses and in his Paris Lectures) in a more universal renewal of the spirit:

There are among us in Poland [here he refers to the virtual Poland that existed in the minds of the emigres, especially the Towianists, not merely to the actual territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that disappeared from the political map in 1795

? UP] great and powerful

88 The story of Mary [sic] and Martha, Luke io: 38-42.




spirits among the Jews and among our common people, the peasants: Israels [Polish: Izraele] ,89 And so all nations liberated in the spirit are now called to the Cause [of God: 'Sprawa Boza', as Towianski expressed it], especially Poland and France. [...]

You, Polish Women, should know that today's epoch is very important for you. It is the epoch of the liberation of women. The Master [that is

Towianski] has clearly revealed that this is a crucial part of the Cause.90 Whoever does not recognize and feel this, is not in the Cause. Women are called to equality; spirits do not have gender [the statement discussed above as a possible claim for androgyny, though it is somewhat at odds with the idea of a mystical principle of eternal femininity

? UP], they are equal

and called to actions appropriate to the differences in their organization [sic]. Until now you were slaves; you were given

a subordinate role, the most convenient one for a husband. Woman could not interfere in

anything. The kitchen, the household were given to her. The qualities of women were wrongly understood. [...] In their very upbringing they were

taught affectation and hypocrisy, how to hide themselves and shine only in outward appearances.

This oppression of women has begun to be felt by women in recent

times, especially by French women, but they have started to liberate them selves in the wrong way: they despise everything, and have begun to write romances even more free than those by men. And so you should recognize that women are called to brotherhood [sic] in the Cause, to an important role. After all, among us this spirit of women has already awakened ? for

example, Emilia Plater, who was misunderstood and mocked in Warsaw.

Many of our women, such as Klaudyna Potocka, were more capable of sitting on councils, in government, than many men ? both because of their intelligence and the power of their spirit! [my emphases

? UP]91

89 Towianski gives prominence to the special historical-messianic roles of the three Israels

? the Jew, the Frenchman and the Slav (without direcdy specifying Pole) ? in his second

doctrinal work, Wielki period (27 March 1844). See Towianski, Wybor pism, pp. 91, 109-14. For an interpretation of the specific use of 'Israel' or the three 'Israels' in Mickiewicz's

Towianist writings, see Abraham G. Duker, 'The Mystery of the Jews in Mickiewicz's

Towianist Lectures on Slav Literature', The Polish Review, 7, 1962, 3, pp. 40-66. The influ

ence of Judaism on Towiahski's doctrines ? and their elaboration by Mickiewicz ? is

beyond the scope of the current article. For an overview of the treatment by scholars of

the Jewish elements in Mickiewicz, see Krzysztof A. Makowski, 'Watek zydowski w bada

niach nad Mickiewiczem', in Zofia Trojanowiczowa and Zbigniew Przychodniak (eds),

Ksi^ga Mickiewiczowska. Patronowi uczelni w dwusetnq rocznicq urodzin ijg8-igg8, Poznan, 1998,

pp. 419-48. For an important exploration of Kabbalistic elements in Dziady. Part III, see

Stuart Goldberg, 'Konrad and Jacob: A Hypothetical Kabbalistic Subtext in Adam Mick

iewicz's Forefathers' Eve, Part III, Slavic and East European Journal, 45, 2001, 4, pp. 695-715. 90 Towiahski does not refer at all to women's 'liberation' in Biesiada (1841) or Wielki period

(1844), but it is clear, for example, from Seweryn Goszczynski's record (see below) that he

discussed it in conversations. 91 Mickiewicz, 'Przemowienie dia Kola Leonarda Rettla 5 marca 1847', m Mickiewicz,

Dziela igg8-2004, 13, pp. 278-84 (pp. 282-84).



URSULA PHILLIPS 25

Whilst this is not the place exhaustively to analyse the literature on

Towianism,92 a few points about this movement need to be underlined at this point, especially the role played by women, because Mickiewicz's notions and formulations make most sense when understood in this context. Whether we regard Andrzej Towianski as a charlatan who seduced his followers with his magnetic gaze and charismatic words (or hypnotic mumbo-jumbo, depending on one's point of view) or as a

genuine bearer of a new revelation, there is no doubt that Mickiewicz took him entirely seriously and believed that his mission was prophetic and divinely sanctioned; in fact I would claim, as I did above, that

everything that Mickiewicz thought, said and did following his 'conver

sion', irrespective of his break with Towianski in April 1846, was informed by the Master's spirituality. He used his Lectures at the

College de France, and especially Course Four (December 1843-May 1844), as a forum for promoting the doctrine ? and it was for this

reason, which included his sanctioning of the supreme role Towianski had conferred on the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte

? that the lectures were stopped by the French authorities. Towianism was not a 'theol

ogy' but a 'sect',93 dependent not on tradition, scholarship or rational

thinking but on the insights allegedly 'revealed' to one man ? and

expressed in an exclusive and obscurantist language, though they clear

ly absorbed notions common to contemporary 'unofficial' religious thought, such as belief in palingenesis, metempsychosis or reincarna

tion, as well as the rehabilitation of the material (the body, the flesh) and the imminent sacralization of history.94

The reasons why Mickiewicz seized on Towianski and his doctrines are probably threefold: Towianski allegedly cured Mickiewicz's wife

921 refer the reader to Mickiewicz: Encyklopedia, pp. 541-48, and to the following key studies: Stanislaw Pigoh, 'Wstep', in Mickiewicz, Dziela wszystkie, 11, pp. 7-120; Adam

Sikora, Poslannicy slowa: Hoene-Wronski, Towianski, Mickiewicz, Warsaw, 1967; Adam Sikora, Towianski i rozterki romantyzmu, Warsaw, 1969; Konrad Gorski, Mickiewicz-Towianski, Warsaw, 1986; Alina Witkowska, Towianczycy, Warsaw, 1989; Dorota Siwicka, Ton i bicz: Mickiewicz

wsrod towianczykow, Warsaw, 1990; Krzysztof Rutkowski, Braterstwo albo smierc: âbijanie Mickiewicza w Kole Sprawy Bozej, 3rd edn, Gdansk, 1999, and Kossak, Boskie diabfy. 93

I apply this term according to the first meaning given in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th edn, 1993: 'A body of people subscribing to views divergent from those of others within the same religion; a party or faction in a religious body; spec, a religious faction or group regarded as heretical or as deviating from orthodox tradition.' In this sense Towianism was a 'sect' within Roman Catholicism.

94 See Adam Sikora, 'Towianski', in Andrzej Walicki (ed.), Filozofia polska, Warsaw, 1962,

pp. 253-69; Filozofia i mysl spoleczna w latach 1831-1864 (700 lat mysli polskiej), ed. Andrzej Walicki, Warsaw, 1977, pp. 13-101, and Andrzej Walicki, 'Francuskie inspiracje mysli nlozofkzno-religijnej Augusta Cieszkowskiego', in Walicki, Migdzy filozqftq i religiq, pp. 45 99. In addition to his interest in Lamennais (Mickiewicz: Encyklopedia, pp. 262-64), Mickie wicz was familiar with developments in contemporary German theology and biblical

scholarship that questioned many established notions fundamental to 'official' Christianity. In Lectures 18 and 24 of Course Three, he discusses Schleiermacher, in Lecture 22 he refers to D. F. Strauss and Feuerbach; see Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, 10, pp. 222-23, 272, 293.




Celina of her mental illness (the immediate event that most commenta tors agree prompted his 'conversion'), though this did not resolve the fundamental incompatibility in Mickiewicz's relations with his wife; second, Mickiewicz himself was dissatisfied with the contemporary 'official' Church, both because of the Vatican's repressive political record and refusal to support Polish liberationist actions, and because he sought a form of spiritual truth that came from within himself (in the

style of Saint-Martin, Swedenborg, Boehme ? and indeed Emerson or

Fuller) rather than one that was imposed from without; and third, Towianski provided a small group of Polish emigres with a spiritual solution to the agony of exile by revealing a divine reason for their

suffering, prescribing for them a crucial role in the spiritual regenera tion of the world. Rutkowski suggests that when the Lithuanian 'Messiah' appeared in Paris, the signs had already been set by Mickie

wicz for him to be recognized: Mickiewicz 'sought and called forth his alter ego, summoned the wolf from the murk of the Lithuanian backwoods'.95 Had Towianism not been promoted by Mickiewicz, it would not have been a significant episode in the history of Polish culture.

Despite the inclusion of women as prominent players in the running of its activities, the sect's more inclusive methods were by no means

democratic. Also, it is a misconception to portray the Towianist Circle as some kind of lobby for women's rights; women's 'equal' spiritual gifts may have been recognized within the relatively small group of adher

ents, but they did not campaign for any form of women's liberation outside the closed circle. The Circle of God was run as a cult of

personality, where confessions, self-castigations and informing on

'brothers' were the norm, as was the maintenance of the correct 'tone'.96

The type of self-discipline that this (in fact repressive) atmosphere inspired

? as well as the psychology that inclined intelligent people to

be attracted to it in the first place ? is most effectively documented in

the diary kept by another poet-adherent, Seweryn Goszczyfiski (1801 76). It is evident from this contemporary insider witness, as well as from the recent studies of the Towianist women by Rutkowski and Kossak, that the two women closest to the Master were the ones who both

controlled access to him, and maintained discipline among the mem

bers: Towiafiski's wife Karolina and her sister Anna Guttowa (nee

Max). These women played a significant role in Mickiewicz's relations and rift with Towianski. But the response to them from inside the

95 Rutkowski, Braterstwo albo smierc, p. 44. 96 See Stanislaw Pigon, 'Adoracja Towianskiego', in Pigoh, Wsrod tworcow: Studia i szkice z

dziejow literatury i oswiaty, Krakow, 1947, pp. 86?126; Sikora, Towianski i rozterki romantyzmu; Siwicka, Ton i bicz; Kossak, Boskie diabfy; Rutkowski, Braterstwo albo smierc.



URSULA PHILLIPS 27

movement was not a negative one; on the contrary, Goszczynski, in a

similar vein to Mickiewicz in the passages quoted above, praises the

long suppressed spiritual gifts of women, as is evident in his poem to

Anna Guttowa dated 25 July 1847: '[God] sees in woman shackled until now/ What she has been awaiting for eighteen centuries ? /

Mighty as Man, and set free through herself/ On earth just as

her spirit is in heaven' (stanza 7); 'May woman in adversity finally/ Liberate herself by His [Christ's] example and way/ May the world unravel itself according to a new law: the brotherhood [sic] of free women in Christ' (stanza 13).97

The dominant female influence in the Circle on Mickiewicz, how

ever, was probably neither Towianska nor Guttowa, but the spiritually initiated Ksawera Deybel, the 'Princess of Israel', a sobriquet conferred on Deybel by Towianski and indicating that she was numbered among the superior 'Israelite' (izraelskie) souls in the Circle.98 Mickiewicz, it is

generally agreed, had a sexual affair with Deybel whilst she lived in the Mickiewicz household (initially to assist the sick Celina with the upbringing of the children) and had at least one child by him.

Rutkowski shows how until recently the role played by Deybel in Mick iewicz's life had remained unacknowledged (suppressed by Wladyslaw

Mickiewicz, as possibly with Fuller's letters, keen to preserve the public image of his father)

? but that it may have had an important impact not only on his views on women but on his general health and outlook. Gille-Maisani claims in his psychoanalytic approach to Mickiewicz's sexual involvements throughout his life, that this was the only 'healthy' feeling Mickiewicz had for a woman: that it actually did him 'good' (and furthermore that it may have helped him gain 'independence' from Towianski).99

I sense that Rutkowski is right in understanding Deybel as a kind of revelation (or embodiment)

? that is as far as Mickiewicz was concerned ? of such Swedenborgian notions as the awakening and

releasing of the Spirit entrapped in matter through 'physical actions'

(which potentially included the sexual), notions also linked to Mickie wicz's idea of a 'poetry of action' (poezja czynna) which he believed would lead the Spirit released by the Circle to transform political life and save the world, no less.100 Deybel appears to have been highly talented in

97 Seweryn Goszczyhski, Dziennik Sprawy Bozej, ed. Zbigniew Sudolski, Wieslaw Kordaczuk

and Maria M. Matusiak, 2 vols, Warsaw, 1984, 2, pp. 306-07. See also 1, pp. 375-81, where Goszczynski includes notes he made after a conversation on women with the Master (Towiahski); these are written in the same exalted style, and emphasize women's

'magnetism' and superior intuitive powers. 98 See note 89 above.

99 Gille-Maisani, Adam Mickiewicz, p- 822.

100 Rutkowski, 'Miejsce Ksawery', pp. 29-32, 47-52.




expressing the 'movements' of the Spirit through the rituals practised in the Circle. In addition there were her 'magnetic' eyes, inspirational singing, impromptu tears, visions, ability to 'see' more stars above the Master's head than the other brothers. Mickiewicz seems to have

regarded her talent as entirely genuine, that is as revealing 'the truth', and was particularly impressed by the apparent naturalness with which she communed with the Spirit

? there seemed to be an effortless

harmony between the physical and the spiritual.101 As Rutkowski

observes, historians have often noted a link between mysticism and

sexuality. One might also add that 'unorthodox' Christian sects often

indulge in 'unorthodox' sexual practices, such as polygamy, whilst

being totalitarian in enforcing their own rules. Also, to what extent, if at all, can Deybel's obvious sexual charge

? Mickiewicz was not the

only man in the Circle to feel it ? be distinguished from her 'spiritual' energy? Perhaps we should be careful in making any automatic connection between 'freer' sexual dynamics and the 'liberation' of women in the wider sense.

Deybel's dominant position in the Circle indicates how highly Mick iewicz valued her exceptional talents, which seem to have exceeded those of any of the men. Is then the Swedenborgian 'Princess of Israel' also the priestess of his address of 5 March 1847? Or was this princess priestess a more general reference to the untapped spirituality of all

women? In February Mickiewicz had met Fuller. His first letter to her after their meeting (February 1847), in which he affords her a unique status, contains not only prophetic statements about Fuller's role as a

leader of women but also the vital ? and interconnected ? question

about her continued 'virginity': A spirit who has known the old world, who has sinned in the old world and who seeks to make known that old world in the new.

Her base is in the old world; her sphere of action is in the new world; her

peace is in the world to come. She is called upon to feel, to speak, to move within these three worlds. The only one among women initiated into the antique world, the only

one to whom it has been given to touch that which is decisive in today's world and to comprehend in advance the world to come.

Your spirit is bound to the history of Poland, of France, and begins to bind itself to the history of America.

You belong to the second generation of minds. Your mission is to contribute to the deliverance of the Polish, French

and American woman.

You have acquired the right to know and maintain the rights and

obligations, the hopes and exigencies of virginity.

101 Ibid., p. 48.



URSULA PHILLIPS 29

For you, the first step in your deliverance and in the deliverance of

your sex (of a certain class) is to know if it is permitted to you to remain

virgin.102

Of course, the Towianist language is crucial to appreciating the context

here, as are the references to the transmigration of souls and the vari ous generations or orders of spirit;103 and the style is in keeping with

Mickiewicz's addresses to the Circle of God, quoted above, which are

exactly contemporaneous. And he signs it as: 'Your Brother Adam'. I would suggest that his question challenging Fuller's continued

'virginity' is not primarily, or not only, a reference to her sexual life in terms of its private benefits (he would refer to that directly later), but to her principle of female chastity as she portrays it in Woman, yet with a special emphasis: as with the role played by Deybel in the Circle

(the Spirit released through 'physical actions'), so too in Fuller's case, Mickiewicz possibly sees her potential power to affect positive change in the world as dependent on a release of her spiritual energy, which can only come about by renouncing 'virginity' (thus raising again the

question as to where the difference lies, if there is one, between 'spiri tual' and 'sexual' energy). Hence Elaine Showalter is probably right

when she claims 'He was telling her that in repressing her erotic

energies she was denying herself her full power, and thus limiting her usefulness as a leader of women'.104 Seen in this light, Mickiewicz's vision for Fuller is daring: he urges her to renounce her conception of

virginity in Woman as a necessary precondition for female emancipation and effectiveness (as he saw them), positing instead the release of wom en's spiritual energy through sexual release. As this particular focus on the questionable value of female virginity does not appear anywhere else in Mickiewicz's oeuvre, as far as I can discover, this convinces me

more than anything that he was familiar with the text of Woman and understood the model of self-sufficient femininity proposed in it by Fuller.

Virginity, chastity or celibacy, was the cornerstone of Fuller's idea of the truly self-reliant and empowered woman (though Mickiewicz

questioned, as we can see, whether it was in fact empowering). Virgin ity is not seen by Fuller as a negative state of repressed sexuality; for her it represented a positive choice. She invokes various famous virgins of classical mythology and their reworking in Western literature

(including as heroines of Goethe): Diana, Iphigenia, the Vestal virgins,

102 I prefer here the translation in Fuller, Letters, 5, p. 176; Mickiewicz, Dziela ijg8-igg8,

16 pp. 415-17 (p. 415). See Sikora, Towianski i rozterki romantyzmu; Rutkowski, Braterstwo albo smierc, and the

works listed above by Walicki. 104

Showalter, Inventing Herself, p. 55.




Cassandra, Electra, as well as the Virgin Mother of God, and historical

figures such as the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I and the Polish Joan of Arc, Emilia Plater. This is a model of ideal femininity which does not depend on sexual recognition by a man but on its own spiritual authority. Meanwhile in an age when the whole perception of empiri cal (not mythical or ideal) woman's value depended on her role as a literal wife and mother confined to the private sphere, such idealized female figures had to be 'pure' in order to have any authority; the

commonplace perception was that any public activity, including advanced education for women, was itself 'unchaste'. Fuller states as

much in her criticism of George Sand, whom she admired yet believed had forfeited her credibility as a model of womanhood through her unconventional lifestyle (pp. 48-49). A useful explication of Fuller's use

of these classical virgins is provided by Jeffrey Steele:

One of the most warlike of the classical goddesses, Minerva (or Athena, as she is otherwise known) embodies a fierce independence, what Fuller calls 'the virgin, steadfast soul.' This figure evokes a set of female qualities

?

traits such as intelligence, strength, and will ?

that most nineteenth

century Americans usually gendered masculine. Then, by associating female strength with virginity, Fuller went even further, striking at the

very heart of middle-class definitions of the maternal as the ideal female characteristic. Her use of the virgin as a symbol of self-reliance, reflecting the ancient ideal of virgin goddess beyond male control, defined a vision of independent womanhood so threatening that it evoked the misunder

standing and anger of many of her reviewers, who were unwilling to see

the unmarried Minerva (or analogues such as an American Indian woman

'betrothed to the sun') as a model of female being.105

Significantly, Steele notes the connection here with the concept of

virginity of Saint-Martin in Le Nouvel Homme (1792), where he depicts 'in

detail the process of psychological transformation needed to make the

new, spiritual man. Before "divinity can penetrate us," he argued, "it must traverse us in our ignominy and in our grief." After "nourishing within ourselves the [...] grief of spirit," we reach a moment of "virgin

ity" and then "the annunciation takes place in us, and not before

long we perceive that the holy conception has taken place in us as

well.'"106

In the closing paragraphs of Woman, Fuller hints at the imminence of a new kind of woman, a spiritually self-sufficient female messiah,

anticipating a time when 'Woman, self-centred, would never be

absorbed by any relation; it would be only an experience to her as to man. [...] Mary would not be the only virgin mother. Not Manzoni

105 Steele, 'Rhetoric of Transformation', pp. 290-91. 106 Ibid., pp. 293-94.



URSULA PHILLIPS 31

alone would celebrate in his wife the virgin mind with the maternal

wisdom and conjugal affections. The soul is ever young, ever virgin'. 'And when will she appear?' she goes on. 'The woman who shall vindicate their birthright for all women; who shall teach them what to

claim and how to use what they claim? Shall not her name be for her era Victoria, for her country and life Virginia?' (pp. 117-18). Mickiewicz

surely refers to this text in assigning in his letter this special role to Fuller herself. In discussing the concept of virginity in relation to

The Great Lawsuit, and in this instance the texts of the two versions of Woman are identical, Capper observes with reference to this passage that 'as with all her gender models, she touts single states, not as

universally correct behaviour, but as experiments of psychic self

sufficiency that, like Thoreau's economic experiment at Walden three

years later, alter one's perspective and thereby liberate one's sense of

possibilities. [...] Virginity is a trope for the ever-youthful soul and Transcendental being itself.107

Meanwhile, the reference to Alessandro Manzoni and the conjugal state suggests that even within marriage itself, Fuller believed in the

potential of the female mind to remain 'virgin' ? the source, according

to her, of its strength ?

implying that she did in fact foresee a time

beyond her own age when women might be able successfully to com

bine public fulfilment with private (that is with sexual intimacy and

motherhood). Perhaps Mickiewicz was also hinting at this ('For you, the first step in your deliverance and in the deliverance of your sex [...] is to know if it is permitted to you to remain virgin'): it is as though he unhinges Fuller's ideal 'femality' from the necessity for individual women to deny themselves as bodily, sexual beings; he questions the

deeply ingrained contemporary conviction that a woman could not

play a public role and be a mother, and be sexually fulfilled. He thus makes a claim for the individual embodied woman and her personal desires; it is not only a matter of releasing her sexual energy so that she

might be empowered in the public space ? the two go together.

When we look at his subsequent letters to Fuller, this would seem to be borne out. Mickiewicz constantly tells her to live not only in books, but in experience

? and even urges her in the direction of Giovanni Ossoli ('Don't reject unthinkingly those who would stay with you. I am

referring to that little Italian whom you met in the church').108 Apart from telling her, in Showalter's words, 'that in repressing her erotic

energies she was denying herself her full power',109 he also behaved as

107 Capper, The Public Tears, p. 115. 108 Letter of 26 April 1847; Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, 16, pp. 427-31 (p. 427), my

translation here. 109

Showalter, Inventing Herself, p. 55.




an interested friend and confidant (a 'brother' in the Towianist spirit) identifying her private emotional and physical needs. There is a marked difference between the visionary 'tone' of his first letter to Fuller, and the more accessible, even intimate style of the subsequent letters (the last being 9 September 1849), where Mickiewicz gives Fuller life advice, sometimes in blunt and realistic terms, at times even patronizing.

Fuller's letters have not been preserved, but it seems fair to suggest, as many commentators do, that she appointed him as her spiritual guide (her 'guru' and 'therapist', according to Showalter) and that she confided her personal problems to him; his letter of 4 May 1848 suggests, for example, that Mickiewicz knew of her pregnancy and

depression, and understood her fear of physical pain and social isola tion (as an unmarried mother-to-be, separated from Ossoli because of the fighting in Rome, a foreigner and without money): 'You are fright ened at a very natural, very common ailment and you exaggerate it in an extravagant manner. It will depend on you more than you believe whether you suffer more or less. Have more faith in God and accept the cross with courage, if you do not have the courage to be happy about it. Once moral strength is established in you in such a manner as to dominate the physical, God will spare you physical suffering, or will diminish it.'110

Mickiewicz also gave advice regarding her need ? or so he

perceived it ? to experience life, rather than the cerebral world of literature and learning. In his letter of 3 August 1847, he suggests moreover that such private experience is crucial to her public role as an advocate of women:

You have persuaded yourself that all you need is to express your ideas and

feelings in books. [...] You have forgotten that a spirit becomes incarnate

precisely to realize what it has already learned elsewhere. This is the intimate meaning of Christianity. [...] Do not forget that even in your private life as a woman [Mickiewicz's emphasis] you have rights to maintain. Emerson righdy says: give all for love, but this love must not be that of the shepherds of Florian nor that of schoolboys and German ladies. The

relationships which suit you are those which develop and free your spirit, responding to the legitimate needs of your organism and leaving you free at all times.111

And again in his letter of 16 September 1847: I know well that you often feel gay and always animated internally, espe cially when you meditate or compose. But try to get this inner life lodged and established in all your body. [...] You could well fall into sadness and

110 Wellisz, Friendship, p. 34. Here and in the following I use Wellisz's translations from the

original French. The French with Polish translation may be found in Mickiewicz, Dziela

Wp-'MS* l6> PP- 54!-43

Wellisz, Friendship, p. 24; Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, 16, pp. 451-55.



URSULA PHILLIPS 33

discouragement. That is the danger of all sensitive women who have no

great and noble purpose in life. I tried to make you understand the purpose of your existence, to inspire manly [males] sentiments in you. Your mind still does not wish to believe that a new epoch commences and that it has

already begun. New for woman too.112

Is this the advice of a lover or a 'brother'? Perhaps the distinction does not matter. 'Physical experience and self-appreciation, Mickiewicz seemed to be saying, were the keys to changing her life.'113

But why should Fuller set such store by Mickiewicz's advice, wish to confide her spiritual aspirations, intellectual interests and more

mundane problems? It would seem, from her letter to Emerson of 15 March 1847, that she recognized in Mickiewicz something she had been looking for in another human being for a long time:

as I had heard a great deal of him which charmed me, I sent him your poems, and asked him to come and see me. He came, and I found in him

the man I had long wished to see, with the intellect and passions in due proportion for a full and healthy human being, with a soul constantly inspiring. [...] How much time I had wasted on others which I might have

given to this real and important relation. In France, among the many

persons that brought me some good thing, it was only with Mickiewicz, that I felt any deep-founded mental connection.114

And to Rebecca Spring (10 April 1847): I have never sought love as a passion [...]. I do not know whether I have loved at all in the sense of oneness [...]. You ask me if I love M [ickiewicz]. I answer he affected me like music or the richest landscape, my heart beat

with joy that he at once felt beauty in me also. When I was with him I was

happy; and thus far the attraction is so strong that all the way from Paris I felt as if I had left my life behind, and if I followed my inclination I should return at this moment and leave Italy unseen.115

Fuller had also made a powerful impression on Mickiewicz; in his letter (the second) of March 1847, he declares:

I encountered in you a true person [Mickiewicz's emphasis]. [. ..] Such an

encounter on life's journey consoles and fortifies. What happiness it will be

112 Wellisz, Friendship, p. 25; Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, 16, pp. 461-64. 113 Capper, The Public Tears, p. 334. 114 Fuller, Letters, 4, pp. 261-62. The last sentence quoted above was omitted from Memoirs

of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Freeman Clarke and William

Henry Channing, 2 vols, Boston, MA and London, 1852, 2, p. 207, reflecting Emerson's

'censorship' of the Fuller legacy; the only other mention of Mickiewicz in the Memoirs is another very brief quotation in a letter from Fuller to Emerson (2, p. 233). The Memoirs, published not long after her death in 1850, are based entirely on her letters to selected individuals and their own memoirs of her and reflect how the editors wished her to be remembered.

115 Fuller, Letters, 4, pp. 262-63.




when all women recognize the merit of sincerity and truth. [...] I was in

Italy in my youth and I stayed there a long time. No woman touched me. I preferred the paintings. The time is coming when inner beauty, inner

spiritual life will become the first and essential quality of a woman. Without this quality woman will not exert even physical influence.116

Capper identifies in Mickiewicz's letters 'provocative injunctions to liberate herself sexually', encouragement towards 'some sort of free love doctrine'.117 Mickiewicz's letters do not necessarily imply anything as explicit as a free-love doctrine but, whether by intention or by chance

(Ossoli appeared at just the right moment?), Fuller followed Mickie wicz's exhortation to liberate herself. Yet should we be surprised by Mickiewicz's stance? Does he not urge her towards a similar

combination of the spiritual and material identified by Gille-Maisani and Rutkowski in his own relationship with the Towianist 'priestess princess' Ksawera Deybel? However impressed he may have been by Fuller's ideas, I remain unconvinced that she fulfilled any exclusive emotional or sexual function in Mickiewicz's life, not only because of the relationship with Deybel, but because he was also corresponding regularly at this same time with an 'old flame' Konstancja Lubienska,118 also writing to her in blunt and exhortatory terms, likewise encouraging self-reliance and female independence, though in this case more

obviously as a fellow adherent of Towianski's Cause of God, as the

following short excerpts illustrate:

You ought often to feel the need to write to me. [...] I know you, that inside you are superior to what surrounds you. But you are far from feeling and showing that superiority. You are not afraid of armed strength, but

you are afraid or fearful of what you call people's opinions. Don't be afraid of these. Spurn them once and for all [...]. And in your soul and heart don't give in to anyone. You have the right to live. That is the one thing I demand of you. [...] Seek everything that comforts you, that raises you up, that puts you in that state in which I once saw and felt beside you. Because that is life. [...] Don't allow anyone to rule over you. Be free. [...] Your old friend Adam.119

116 Wellisz, Friendship, p. 18; Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, 16, pp. 423-27. 117 Capper, The Public Tears, pp. 333-35. 118 For biographical information on Lubienska, see Mickiewicz: Encyklopedia, pp. 282-84,

and Mickiewicz, Dziela ijg8-igg8, 16, pp. 754-57. Mickiewicz had an affair with her in the

early 1830s. She was interested in the women's question and friendly with early 'feminists'

in the 1840s such as Narcyza Zmichowska and Bibianna Moraczewska; she wrote novels

(including Niedowiarek, 1853, which portrays an idealized version of her affair with Mickie

wicz) and founded the Poznah journal Dziennik Domowy (1840). It is probable she met

Towiahski as early as 1840. 119 Letter to Konstancja Lubienska (December 1846) in Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, 16,

pp. 402-04.



URSULA PHILLIPS 35

You accuse me of being angry with you. Perhaps now you see it differ

ently, perhaps you have already sensed that my conduct flowed from real

respect towards you, from genuine manly love and the desire to see you as

soon as possible as free, as strong and as full of life outwardly as you are

in your soul. You will not achieve this freedom, you will not find your way on this earth, if you continue to have no higher goal before your eyes

?

the goal about which we have spoken so much. And it's not enough just to have it before our eyes; we should strive, burning, towards it. That striving is the essence of life, and the rest is only a supplement. [...] You know how dear your friendship is to me. [...] Let us both make the most of a

friendship which, I hope, will grow purer and purer, and for us both more and more beneficial. [...] Believe in my deep and unchanging feeling for

you. Your Adam Mickiewicz.120

Neither the well-educated Lubienska, active only in her limited sphere of the Poznafi region of Prussian-occupied Poland, nor the 'spiritually' talented Deybel, confined to the limited environment of the Towianist

circles, could compare, however, with Fuller's intellectual accomplish ments. Fuller was not only a world-class intellectual and published author, she was active in many social spheres and had written on

the need for social reforms. Although his earlier pronouncements about female emancipation in the Polish patriotic context clearly had a (limited) political dimension, it was not until after he encountered Fuller (and read her book, and perhaps even discussed it with her) that his utterances take on a more socially proactive tone: woman is not

only to release her spiritual energy, revitalize the life of the 'church' as its 'priestess', but to effect political change, literally save the world. This is the extreme, but logical, progression from the vision of the eternal

feminine, the female principle as saviour, in Goethe's Faust. Lawski is

right to emphasize the predominance of the spiritual in Mickiewicz's

feminism, but it is also a feminism that is intended, at least in theory, to have a material effect on the social structures and politics of this world, irrespective of whether Mickiewicz himself did anything practical to activate it.

The political significance of his 'new' woman is nowhere better articulated than in the List of Principles of the Polish Legion, which was founded and led by Mickiewicz and took part in events in Italy in

1848-49.121 While the Legion was criticized as a crazy ill-judged esca

pade by all Polish emigre circles in Paris, irrespective of their political loyalties, and also by Towianski, it had one great admirer: Margaret

120 Ibid., pp. 468-69 (Letter of October 1847). 121 See Mickiewicz: Encyklopedia, pp. 595-97; Wladyslaw Mickiewicz, Legion Mickiewicza: Rok

184.8, Krakow, 1921, and Stefan Kieniewicz, Legion Mickiewicza i848-i84g, Warsaw, 1957. On the Legion in the context of the international ideological and insurrectionary ferment, see Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871, London, IQ99




Fuller, as her reports to the New York Daily Tribune testify.122 The fifteen

paragraphs of the Legion's Principles, tersely expressed, again in the

exalted, mystical tone of the Towianists, defend the 'Christian spirit' in a somewhat free interpretation of Roman Catholicism, the 'Word of God' and the freedom and brotherhood of all believing denominations,

peoples and nations, including the Jews (paragraph 10), and call for the

equal rights of all citizens ? in other words, the emancipation of all the peasants (serfs) in all three partitions. It is clear from this document

(dated Rome, 29 March 1848) that the struggle for the 'liberation' of

Italy also included for Mickiewicz, not surprisingly, the liberation of Poland. But most important for our purpose is paragraph 11, which I

quote in Fuller's translation, along with her comment to The New York

Daily Tribune: '"To the companion of life, woman, citizenship, entire

equality of rights". This last expression of just thought the Poles ought to initiate, for what other nation had had such truly heroic women?

Women indeed ? not children, servants or playthings.'123 There is no doubt that Mickiewicz regarded the List of Principles as a political programme to be enforced if necessary by military means: however

impractical this may have appeared to more realistic observers, it

'cannot come to life, if it is not supported by sufficient force'.124 Given his admiration for Fuller in the months leading up to this

declaration, as well as his decided shift from a purely spiritual and/or limited patriotic 'emancipation' at roughly the same time as he became

acquainted with her, it is difficult to conclude that it does not bear

Fuller's mark. The literary critic Waclaw Kubacki, who wrote a drama

about Mickiewicz's friendship with Fuller against the background of the involvement of both in the 1848-49 events in Rome, entitled Rzymska wiosna (Roman Spring, 1955), would seem to agree. In the closing scene

Mickiewicz bids farewell to Margaret with the following words: 'As a souvenir of our shared ideas and dreams, I inserted one verse of

my List of Principles with the thought of you. [...] The eleventh article

of my political [sic] programme: To the companion of life, woman, brotherhood and citizenship, equal rights in everything.'125

122 Fuller, Writings, p. 452 (29 March 1848) and pp. 461-64 (19 April 1848); 'Those Sad But

Glorious Days', pp. 212, 222-24. 123 Fuller, Writings, p. 462. Interestingly (or significandy) Fuller misses out the 'brother

hood' included in Mickiewicz's original formulation: Towarzyszce zywota, niewiescie, braterstwo i obywatelstwo, rowne we wszystkim prawo.' Adam Mickiewicz, Dziela

mS-m8* !2, pp. io-ii. Letter to Michal Kamiehski, Milan, 9 May 1848 in ibid., 16, pp. 549-51 (p. 550).

125Waclaw Kubacki, Rzymska wiosna, Warsaw, 1955, p. 77; also mentioned by Skwara,

Krqg transcendentalistow, p. 67. The play suggests that Margaret may have been in love with

Mickiewicz, but that his main concern was the Polish cause and his Legion.



URSULA PHILLIPS 37

Conclusions

This article has looked at the Polish literary scholarship on the relation

ship between Mickiewicz and Fuller, at recent American scholarship on Fuller and at the Polish textual evidence, that is at Mickiewicz's letters to Fuller, as well as his utterances elsewhere during the 1840s on what was known contemporaneously as the women's question. It concentrates on the impact of the relationship on Mickiewicz rather than on Fuller. It concludes that it is very likely that Mickiewicz was

familiar with Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), or at êast with its earlier version The Great Lawsuit (1843), and that Fuller influ enced Mickiewicz's ideas: his declarations on the equality and libera tion of women in 1847 and 1848 were decidedly more socially targeted as well as universal (rather than focused on Poland) than they had been in his Paris lectures (1841-44). His acquaintance with Fuller coincides

with a shift in emphasis from a spiritual to a more socio-political style of feminism. Meanwhile it could be argued that Fuller, already convinced by her friendship with Mazzini of the cause of oppressed nations, herself became more politicized in 1848 under the influence of Mickiewicz's political messianism and actively supported the

revolutionary side in Rome. In September 1849 in his final letter to Fuller (eighteen months

after he had last written), Mickiewicz invited her to write for La Tribune des Peuples; but he does not specify any subject matter, and Fuller was

capable of writing on a wide range of subjects (the paper closed down, however, in November): 'You might well send some articles to this

newspaper, even if only copies of those you write for the American

papers.'126 This request suggests that he would happily have received material from Fuller on whatever subject, including on the women's

question, but that he did not appear to intend to use her to promote this particular agenda. In all the articles he himself wrote for La Tribune des Peuples (during 1849), he did not mention this subject. After the Fuller 'episode' Mickiewicz did not write again about women's

emancipation, spiritual or otherwise.

Despite his demand in the Legion's List of Principles ('equal rights in all things'), Mickiewicz did nothing practical to expand women's educational opportunities or campaign for their access to paid employ

ment ? or, in France at least, enable them to participate in the

political process. The 'word' was not converted into 'action'. Can we

really speak then of Mickiewicz as a supporter of women's 'rights' as some commentators have done? It has to be said that his feminism remained a Romantic idea: essentially religious or spiritual despite its

126 Wellisz, Friendship, p. 38; Mickiewicz, Dziela iyg8-igg8, 17, pp. 49-52 (Letter of 9

September 1849).




social and political claims, predicated on some future 'Christianized'

political order. Donna Dickenson devotes less space than other bio

graphers to speculations about the relationship between Mickiewicz and Fuller, yet she hits on exactly the right 'tone': 'apocalyptic femi nism'. Fuller's feminism sprang from the same spiritual and intellec tual roots and in Woman was similar in tone, yet one suspects on the basis of her more socially orientated work (her articles for the New York

Daily Tribune for instance) that Fuller, had she lived, would have tried to realize far greater rights for women in American public life.

On the personal level, there is no doubt that the impression they made on one another was profound and, as I have tried to show, was a meeting of mature minds with common interests. Fuller appeared to

Mickiewicz at the right moment, so to speak, as the most complete embodiment of his ideal of spiritual womanhood; while Fuller met in

Mickiewicz not only another inspirational 'poet-preacher' (following Emerson and Goethe)127 who further fired her 'enthusiasm', but a

trusted friend and advisor, whom she chose as the godfather of her son.128 It is unknown how Mickiewicz reacted to Fuller's death in the

shipwreck off Fire Island on her journey back to the United States in

1850 with Ossoli and the child. Wellisz claims that 'It was a dark day for Mickiewicz, when the news of Margaret's tragic death reached

him', but quotes no source.129 Zielinska concludes that 'the answer to this question remains a mystery',130 and here I agree with her as I can

find no evidence in Mickiewicz's letters of his reaction. Fuller's death was widely publicized in the contemporary international press, so it is inconceivable that Mickiewicz did not hear of it.

There is no concrete evidence to suggest that Fuller played any

exceptional role in Mickiewicz's personal life, however. It was Fuller's

extraordinary intellectual achievements and her model of independent female being that made her different from Ksawera Deybel or

Konstancja Lubienska, although Mickiewicz questions the very princi ple (her special understanding of 'virginity') on which she based this model in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which in turns proves

? to me at least ? that he was well acquainted with this text.

127 Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse, p. 260: 'For years she had believed ? as most of

the Transcendentalists believed ? that the poet-preacher was at the pinnacle of the human

hierarchy.' 1281 agree with Marta Skwara, Krqg transcendentalistow, p. 65, that, given Fuller's scrupulous

character, she would have been unlikely to have chosen the child's biological father as his

godfather. 129 Wellisz, Friendship, p. 39. 130 Zielinska, Tajemnica przyjazni, p. 78.



Documents

Apocalyptic Feminism Adam Mickiewicz and Margaret Fuller