Reconfiguring ‘public attention’: Margaret Fuller in New York City

Abstract

While many urban essayists focused upon descriptions of city streets, Fuller – following in the footsteps of her friend Lydia Maria Child – was interested less in recording the sights of the city than in measuring the limits of urban vision. Dedicated to social change, she supplemented vision with multiple organs of perception – the heart, the soul, and the imagination. Resisting the obvious temptation to focus only on visible spaces of the city, Fuller reveals that the image of the “urban panorama” as a continuous spatial field is a fiction that sutures the social and political divisions. As she confronted the discontinuous spaces of the modern metropolis, Fuller moved far beyond spectatorial observation – which objectified the persons and places visible in an urban panorama – to include aspects of urban experience that were discontinuous or invisible. Focusing on the links between public awareness and social change, Fuller began adapting to urban life Transcendentalist models of individual self-reliance. In place of the self-reliant individual tapping into and utilizing the unconscious energies of the Oversoul, she dramatized herself as the journalist whose public reflections brought to the surface unseen political energies located in the communal psyche of the body politic. This process of political investment depended upon Fuller’s keen understanding of what she termed “public attention” – the field of communal interest generated through texts focusing shared concern onto specific cultural issues and problems. Molding public attention, Fuller’s New-York Tribune essays doubled vision, lifting readers above the sights of the city, by supplementing the immediacy of experience with parallel planes of reflection. She models for her readers processes of compassionate witnessing that bring the poor and institutionalized into the perceptual field of middle-class urban consciousness. In the process, she breaks down barriers that relegated the disabled, insane, and criminalized to preserves cut off from the city’s collective gaze, creating a modified form of Transcendentalist idealism that I term “sentimental Transcendentalism.” This mode of writing surpasses merely visual modes of representation by measuring the distance between visible urban realities and invisible standards of response. It creates a ‘stereoscopic’ overlay by pairing visible scenes with imagined analogues – whether models of sympathy, imaginary vistas, or historical echoes. The resulting double exposure places Fuller’s readers in two places at the same time – in the immediate, visible city and in a ‘virtual city’ available to the mind’s eye.