American Philosophy (23 page)

I peered out of one of the attic's two small windows: Though I couldn't see it in the dark, I knew Mount Chocorua was out there. Men had scaled it, and fallen off it, for centuries. It was easy to forget the women who'd played a part in the mountain's story. For instance, Chocorua's name would never have made it to the nineteenth century were it not for a writer who was arguably the first woman of American philosophy. In 1829 Thomas Cole painted
The Death of Chocorua
, a sublime Romantic piece that depicted the fate of the Abenaki chief. The painting was promptly lost, but an engraving of it was published in an 1830 gift volume called
The Token
, which had somehow made its way to the attic at West Wind. Next to the engraving was a story called “The Curse of Chocorua,” written by a young author named Lydia Maria Child.

Before Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, or Jane Addams, there was Lydia Maria Child. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called her “the first woman of the Republic.” This was no exaggeration. Child was born in 1802 and became the grande dame of American Transcendentalism. She was friendly with most of the thinkers who circulated through Concord and Boston; and many—including Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Garrison—admired her as a philosopher and social reformer. “The Curse of Chocorua” was a foray into a life of social and political activism, one of many attempts to advocate for the rights of the oppressed. In her rendering of the story, Child suggested that European arrogance was largely to blame for the tragedy that befell Chocorua, a view that ran directly against the prevailing political grain. She championed the rights of women throughout her career, emphasizing the ways that women, rather than their male counterparts, could be self-reliant. After all, Child argued, women
had
to be self-reliant—cooking, cleaning, raising children, keeping a house, making ends meet—because ultimately they were expected to take care of the men.

Thoreau was enough of an iconoclast to admire her argument. He'd read at least three of her novels in his undergraduate days, and his experiment in simple living at Walden took its cues from Child's 1829
The Frugal Housewife
, in which she argued for the virtues of humble living in the face of modernity's decadence. These positions made her work controversial but also popular. Then, in 1833, she became the first person in America to write a comprehensive history of slavery in the United States,
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans.
This was no longer palatable controversy. Garrison loved it, remarking that any “heart must be harder than the nether mill-stone which can remain unaffected by the solemn truths it contains.” William Ellery Channing, who was the most prominent Unitarian minister in America and soon to be its most vocal abolitionist, walked from Boston to Roxbury to thank Child for sending him the book. But everyone else hated it, and Child's book sales plummeted.

She hardly flinched. Throughout the 1830s she attended Emerson's seminal lectures and occasionally blasted them for turning a blind eye to injustice. She eventually published most of these criticisms in 1843 in her
Letters from New-York.
Child listened to Emerson's lecture on “Being and Seeming” in the winter of 1838 and wrote a review that began, “In the course of many remarks, as true as they were graceful, he urged women to
be
, rather than to
seem.
” On the face of it, this was commendable—the suggestion that women should not be fixated on appearances—but Child discerned a less-than-noble motive in Emerson's words: “He told them … that earnest simplicity, the sincerity of nature, would kindle the eye, light up the countenance, and give an inexpressible charm to the plainest features.”

Light up the countenance? This was too much for Child to stomach. The sage of Concord, along with every other man in New England, was a sexist. Emerson's advice amounted to telling women that being rather than seeming would make them more pleasing for men to look at. “The advice was excellent,” wrote Child, “but the motive, by which it was urged, brought a flush of indignation over my face.
Men
were exhorted to
be
, rather than to
seem
, that they might fulfil the sacred mission for which their souls were embodied, that they might, in God's freedom, grow up into the full stature of spiritual manhood; but
women
were urged to simplicity and truthfulness, that they might be become more ‘
pleasing
.'” Men were expected to please God, but women were just expected to please men. Child was furious: “What weakness, vanity, frivolity, infirmity of moral purpose, sinful flexibility of principle—in a word, what soul-stifling, has been the result of thus putting man in the place of God!”

Men, made in God's image, were to exist for the sake of themselves, for the sake of their self-reliant souls, in the face of the divine. Women, on the other hand, were to exist merely for the pleasure of their husbands, who had conveniently placed themselves in the role of the Almighty. A hundred years after the publication of
Letters from New-York
, little had changed in the relationships between men and women. I thought about Hocking's paintings strewn around the first floor. Agnes must have carted some of them in front of her husband's lectern, making sure not to disrupt his presentation. Many of them were self-portraits, so very carefully executed. Hocking had read enough Dante to know that self-love was the reason that most souls ended up in Purgatory. And he'd desperately tried to overcome his solipsism, but I wasn't sure he'd entirely succeeded. Most men of Hocking's age fell in love at a very early age. With themselves. And the women they loved were expected to deal with this belief acquired in their youth—that they were the absolute center of everyone else's universe.

*   *   *

Carol and I backed into the eaves, where I'd once found the literary remains of Walt Whitman and John Boyle O'Reilly. With two headlamps we could see things I'd missed on that evening I'd done my best to forget. Our beams darted around the attic for several minutes, dancing across the walls, casting shadows on an even stranger corner of Hocking family history, one that would remain intentionally hidden until I could figure out how to face it. We cast our attention elsewhere, finally settling on a small blanket chest next to the O'Reilly books. It was empty save for a single leather notebook and a handful of clippings strewn across the bottom. The notebook looked like something from the turn of the nineteenth century and was filled with handwritten poems. I flipped through quickly, but I could not make sense of the anonymous poems, with only a few titles. Carol dug through the clippings and after a minute handed me an obituary from
The New York Times
dated July 21, 1882: “The Death of Fanny Parnell: The Sister of the Irish Leader Dies in Bordentown.”

At the height of the Irish nationalist movement in the 1870s, its leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, was deemed the “un-crowned king of Ireland.” Fanny was Charles's sister, and one of the founders of the Ladies' Land League, which—despite its innocuous title—was one of the more radical nationalist organizations in Ireland. Fanny, called the “Patriot Poet,” was best known for her writing, which was published on both sides of the Atlantic and frequently called “war propaganda.” This soiled notebook contained the handwritten manuscript of nearly all her poems. Many had been published in O'Reilly's
Pilot
—then the most famous Irish paper in the United States.

Fanny had come to the country in 1874 and died eight years later at the age of thirty-three. In her short life she'd seized the imagination of Americans, who could still vaguely remember their own call to revolution. Irish Americans in Boston were especially enamored of her and paid tribute to her for decades after she was gone. “It became a habit in Boston,” according to the historian Roy Foster, “to make a pilgrimage to Fanny's grave on Memorial Day, with speeches, floral tributes, and a general demonstration of grief … Her influence and inspiration were of a unique type during her lifetime; she remained a cult figure after her death.” I leafed through the notebook. The American War of Independence, American abolitionism, and the Irish Land War were battles not only for freedom, but battles for a room of one's own. Sixty-seven pages of poems with one message: It's better to die than to be stripped of one's homeland. I turned to “Hold the Harvest,” Parnell's most famous poem, written out in a quick yet oddly controlled hand. This one had been quoted as evidence against Irish nationalists of the time, proof that they were violent hooligans. Fanny extolled her Irish brethren to “hold their harvest” from absentee landlords:

Now are you men or cattle then, you tillers of the soil?

Would you be free, or evermore in rich men's service toil?

The shadow of the dial hangs dark that points the fatal hour

Now hold your own! Or, branded slaves, forever cringe and cower!

Fanny's sister Anna was even more militant. When her brother Charles faced imprisonment in 1881, he charged the Ladies' Land League with keeping the home fires of Irish nationalism alive. Fanny stayed in the United States, raising thousands of dollars for the Irish cause, but Anna went back home to Ireland and trained women in the subtle acts of civil disobedience. She encouraged women in the rural areas to leave their houses, protest in the streets, resist the authorities, and boycott.

Many bids for freedom, however, end tragically. O'Reilly published Fanny's poems but secretly bad-mouthed her writing. Even her obituary provided hints of derision: “Having travelled extensively in Europe, and always moving in a refined atmosphere, she had acquired a large store of information, which would be more highly prized by philosophers and poets than by the gentler sex.” To the end, the Parnell sisters were viewed not as intellectuals or heroic freedom fighters, but as extremely uppity women. When Charles Parnell signed the Kilmainham Treaty in May 1882, functionally ending the Irish Land War, the British demanded that he disband his sisters' Land League. He obliged, and women were, once again, written out of the battle for independence.

In Irish poetry, women weren't people, but icons—much like Dante's Beatrice—meant to be revered or rescued by men. Irish women were to be seen and worshipped, but certainly not heard. They were embodied in “old mother Ireland,” to whom her valiant sons devoted lifelong service, but when Irish sisters got together and did something on their own, they became the targets of a deeply misogynistic culture. Fanny's fame grew after her death, and she lived on, as so many famous women do, in posthumous mythology. Men who couldn't have controlled her in person managed to control her memory quite nicely. Carol handed me Fanny's “Ireland, Mother,” a short, biting piece that would have galled her brother:

Vain, ah, vain is a woman's prayer!

Vain is a woman's hot despair;

Naught can she do, naught can she dare,—

I am a woman, I can do naught for thee;

Ireland, mother!

Carol and I dug through the various obituaries, many of which had been written by O'Reilly. For three months after Fanny's death her body was carted around the major Irish centers of the Northeast—Philadelphia, New York, Boston—and tens of thousands came out to join the macabre circus. In New York, her body was processed up Broadway from the Fifth Avenue Hotel at Twenty-Third Street to Grand Central Station. People packed the sidewalks every inch of the way to watch Fanny be carried off into history. A huge funeral was arranged at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, and O'Reilly wrote up the proceedings in wrenching detail. He might have found her annoying in life, but in death Fanny could do no wrong: “her lyre would only respond to one breeze—nationality,” and her “noble heart-work” had “a magnetic and almost startling force.” What was truly depressing was how Fanny subsequently vanished from the history of Irish independence. In 1912 James Joyce likened her brother Charles to “another Moses,” who had “led a turbulent and unstable people from the house of shame to the verge of the Promised Land.” By that point, however, most people had forgotten Fanny.

After many minutes in the darkness Carol shook her head. “That,” she said, turning away from me, “is sad.”

My hands skimmed the bottom of the chest. Nothing left. But memory, when it speaks, insists that nothing is ever fully gone. I sat down on the dusty floorboards and let Carol wander off to the other side of the attic toward a more hopeful set of books. I couldn't shake a guilty feeling, as if I were somehow personally responsible for Fanny's fate—for all the Fannys of the world—culpable for the misogyny and disrespect they'd faced and to which they'd eventually succumbed. Of course this made the guilt sound almost heroic, which was my first and only hint that I was still, after all these years, lying to myself. The truth was much simpler and less attractive: I'd recently left a woman, and though I hadn't felt regret at the time, now, on these unforgiving floorboards, I found myself terrified by the thought that I might do it again. I cherished my public persona as a Really Nice Guy, but the fact was that in my heart of hearts, in my own personal attic, I frequently viewed other people as mere things—to be avoided, to be managed—not as other people whose inner lives could possibly be as immediate and vivid as my own.

Suddenly my grandmother came to mind—a slight, saintly woman from a small coal town in Pennsylvania who had once, long ago, picked me up from elementary school. On the drive home she'd been cut off on the freeway and had leaned over into the passenger seat to tell her eight-year-old grandson a secret. “Hell, my love,” she said quietly, “ain't half full.” As a child, I'd been pretty sure she was right, and sure that my father—who drank too much, yelled too much, and abandoned his family—was going to do his part in filling it up. If I did nothing significant in life, if I was a complete and utter failure, I'd sworn that at the very least I would avoid becoming him. Two decades later, in the middle of an especially loud argument and on the brink of divorce, my wife took off her wedding ring and hurled it across the bedroom. Then she burst into tears, crawled on her hands and knees to find it, and promptly sold it on eBay. In case I had any doubts about the matter, she assured me that I'd become my father. As if to offer my confirmation of that fact, after she went to sleep that night, I went out and drank myself into oblivion.