From Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings
“We have been delighted by the sight of two fine Magnolias in full flower, in the garden of Mr. Davison, corner of Smith and Livingston Sts, Brooklyn,” Margaret Fuller wrote in a short notice for the New-York Tribune in April 1846. “We recommend to all who have leisure, and wish to be refreshed by Nature’s fairest love-letters, to visit this garden immediately. If the Rose is the Queen of flowers, the Magnolia is the Empress.”
It was a promotion of sorts for “the Queen of the South,” the plant that had been at the center of “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” an allegorical tale Fuller wrote six years earlier about an unusual specimen of Magnolia grandiflora in Louisiana. When Brigitte Bailey (a coeditor of the Library of America edition of Fuller’s writings) was asked to recommend selections for newcomers to the work, she included this tale in a trio of writings that might prove more accessible to modern readers: “short, mystical, visionary pieces that show Fuller working with gender issues and archetypal symbols: ‘The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,’ ‘Leila,’ and ‘Yuca Filamentosa.’ Here we find a very different Fuller from the critic whose ‘analytic process’ . . . judges a cultural work and interprets it for the reader.“
Many scholars have suggested a second reason why the Magnolia tale might be of interest to modern readers: the “interview” (as Fuller called it) between the unusually voluble tree and the story’s narrator can be read as a reflection of the relationship between Fuller and her mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who arranged for her to become editor of The Dial—a job she held for two years without pay. “Fuller was attracted to Emersonian thinking because it emphasized the value of mind and soul without seeming to ask much about the possessor’s sex,” writes John Matteson, author of The Lives of Margaret Fuller. “However, there was a flavor of exploitation in the work she was given, even if Emerson sincerely apologized for the failure of The Dial to repay her efforts.” They were likeminded in many ways, but she ultimately faulted him for “inhospitality of soul.” “You are intellect;” she wrote to him, “I am life.”
We present “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” as our Story of the Week selection, along with an introduction describing how Margaret Fuller became editor of The Dial and how the idea for the story came from an eccentric neighbor.
Read “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” by Margaret Fuller
