Self-Made Women - Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Fanny Fern, masters of women's independence

Transcendentalism, despite its progressive ideas, was still a product of its time, and its adherents sometimes sustained misogynistic beliefs, and, for this reason, women and their contributions were considered marginal. One of the transcendentalists’ main purposes, also following the example of their guru Ralph Waldo Emerson, was to create an American way of thinking and culture. However, due to the sexism of the time, they didn’t realize that some women writers anticipated them and had already begun the process of creating a unique American identity many years before them.
One of these women was none other than Catharine Maria Sedgwick, since her A New-England Tale (1822) and Hope Leslie (1827) anticipated Emerson’s thought by nearly a decade. She shaped the concepts that the Transcendental movement would later consider crucial for its philosophy, starting from the “effort to add something to the scanty stock of native American literature”, as she states in the preface to her first novel. Sedgwick wanted to create something distinctively American, as Emerson stated in his essay. In Nature (1836), for example, he wrote “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship”, a sentence that encouraged Americans to rely on their new country, which could be as full of resources as Europe itself, still considered the source of inspiration. However, Emerson declares in The American Scholar (1837) that “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close”, highlighting the fact that Americans had to rely on themselves, and cease their dependence from the old continent, since they were finally ready to “stand on their own feet”. Sedgwick also anticipated many of Emerson’s religious concepts, many of which are presented in his Nature, such as the connection between God and nature: Sedgwick wrote about this tie and the idea that man should look for his laws inside the natural world in both A New-England Tale and Hope Leslie.

However, canonized male authors did not give credit to female writers as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, both for personal and for ideological reasons: Transcendentalism, in fact, mostly dealt with looking for the traits which outlined the American man, and large part of its writings concerned that theme. Women, on the contrary, mainly wrote about domestic affairs and sentimental emotions, and despite some women writers, like Sedgwick, wrote about what it means to be independent or self-reliant women, they were still considered outside the literary canon. Transcendentalist wanted to create a new elite, in which there was no room for women and their “superficial” writings, and wanted to establish a prototypical American man, as if the American nation had to be founded only on men and their actions.
Transcendentalists believed that, as well as their country, also American literature had to be based on the contribution of male authors, despite the popularity that female authors (especially Catharine Maria Sedgwick) were gaining in the nineteenth century, that, in many cases, exceeded that of the male counterpart.
Despite her literary fame and her being neglected, what strictly connects Sedgwick to Transcendentalism is the fact that she anticipated, in her writings, many of the issues which had been subsequently treated by transcendentalists. As Emerson himself, Sedgwick used her writings as a vehicle for social and religious reform, aiming at teaching something to the American people. Both believed that the means to reach a reformed society was the self and being true to ourselves, but the difference is that Emerson referred specifically to men, while Sedgwick transcended gender, and created many characters which embodied the concept of self-reliance elaborated by Emerson. However, her most successful characters are female ones, such as Hope Leslie and Jane Elton, two perfect examples of self-reliant women who let their innate nature to shape their personality. These characters, and in particular Hope Leslie, anticipate and incarnate the ideals proposed by Emerson, such as his emphasis on education and intellectual freedom. Sarah Kingston, in her essay, states that “Hope turn out to be an ideal Emersonian citizen”, since she is a remarkable American figure due to her love for arbitrary authority and intellectual freedom.

Sedgwick and Emerson didn’t only focus on issues of citizenship and moral independence, but they also expressed their opinion on the relationship between God and nature. Sedgwick, in particular, thought that, since America was mostly made of wilderness, the connection between an American religion and the natural world would have been obvious. Emerson will later confirm Sedgwick’s thought and her characters’ connection to nature, by advocating “an occult relation between man and vegetable”. Emerson, in fact, believed that humankind was integrated into wider plans designed by God: man, thus, is never alone, and “if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars”, in order to find God and the explanations needed. It is remarkable how Sedgwick anticipated also these concepts through her characters: Magawiskca, in particular, states that “there is no solitude in me; the Great Spirit, and his ministers, are everywhere present and visible to the eye of the soul that loves him; nature is but his interpreter […]. Those beautiful lights … that shine alike on your stately domes and our forest homes, speak to me of his love to all.”. They both agree also on the dangerous separation of soul from nature, and Sedgwick’s Magawisca considers separation from nature worse than death. The similarity between these two sentences and the concepts behind them is impressive, and they underlie once again Sedgwick’s ability to foresee ideas which would be later conceived by Emerson and turned into cornerstones of his movement. Sedgwick’s purpose was, in fact, that of educating people and inspiring a social change. Her main goal was to encourage people, and specifically women, towards selfreliance and independence, where the “self” has a central and determinant role in order to induce a change also in the surrounding society. Her interest in the role of women in the new American republic was determinant, since inspired many women and proposed many different and new models to follow. These ideas, in addition to the one which linked God to the natural world, make Sedgwick the first author to develop such concepts and to convert them into literary works: in fact, she couldn’t imagine that Emerson and the transcendentalists would employ the same issues more than a decade after her the publication of her works.
However, since women were ascribed to the sentimental genre and were not evaluated as they would deserve, Catharine Maria Sedgwick was overlooked by transcendentalists, as well as her ideas and literary works. She was not, in fact, one of those women writers who dedicated themselves just to the sentimental novel typical of female writings, which, in some cases, were pointless and disengaged. Her writings, on the contrary, address different themes, some of which arose for the first time, and she can be considered one of the most incisive writers of early nineteenth century, besides being probably a predecessor of the transcendental movement. Moreover, she is one of the most interesting female writers of her time and one of the first “Self-Made Women”, who, in the name of independence and self-fulfilment, decided to go against social standards and live on literature.