by John Kaag
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, Bo
ston—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.
These were memories I could no longer suppress or rewrite. As Schopenhauer put it, “[I]n his powers of reflection [and] memory … man possesses, as it were, a machine for condensing and storing up … his sorrows … [I]t develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery to such a degree that, at one moment, the man is brought in an instant to a state of delight that may even prove fatal, at another to the depths of despair and suicide.” I couldn’t go back in time to make Hocking understand how shortsighted he’d been, how his entire philosophical legacy would be lost in the hinterlands of New Hampshire, and how he shouldn’t have let his wife fawn all over him. But suddenly I wished I could. And I wished similar things for my own past. Lines from the canon of American philosophy, written more than a century ago, continued to haunt me. One from Royce’s The World and the Individual stuck in my head and refused to budge: “The most notable feature of the past is that it is irrevocable … unchangeable, adamantine, the safest of storehouses, the home of the eternal ages.” Adamantine: an unbreakable metal from the mythical past. According to Virgil, the gates to Tartarus are made of the stuff. Milton says that the Devil himself is bound up in adamantine chains.
According to Royce, who’d witnessed his son’s psychological collapse, our histories are full of adamant atrocities. After Christopher died, Royce maintained his conviction that “salvation comes through loyalty,” but he was, for the rest of his life, plagued by the question of how one might be saved if he had willfully failed to be loyal to his cause. Disloyalty was an act by which one “should violate the fidelity that is to me the very essence of my moral interest in my existence.” It was, in his words, an act of “moral suicide.” Royce wasn’t the first writer to make this point: Dante had beaten him to it by several hundred years. The Archangel’s sin, what gets him banished to a frozen lake at the very bottom of hell, is one monstrously traitorous act. How could one live with this sort of betrayal? Painfully. Royce, however, suggested that this pain could, under certain circumstances, be meaningful: “No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.”
In the end, my ex-wife and I had split on surprisingly good terms. After the yelling and ring throwing, we’d been able to say our goodbyes amicably enough. But one of the “good” terms of our divorce was that we agreed never to speak to each other again. In that dusty attic I had the almost irresistible urge to call her, to write her a letter mapping the contours of my traitorous mind, to ask for her forgiveness. But I also knew this was something I would never do. At least I’d keep this promise. I pushed the chest full of nothing back under the eaves.
The point of Roycean atonement isn’t to seek forgiveness, and it isn’t to nullify the act of disloyalty—the first is often shallow and the second is always impossible. For Royce, after the devastation of moral suicide, atonement brings “out of the realm of death a new life that only this very death rendered possible.” It was a phoenixlike second chance that, until now, had always struck me as too convenient. “The world, as transformed by [atonement],” according to Royce, “is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.” Agnes, Lydia, and Fanny deserved another shot at freedom and homecoming, but somehow, by some act of cosmic injustice or infinite mercy, I was the one who was granted a second chance.
In the best-case scenario, if we had remained married, my first marriage would have been miserable, the archetypal life of quiet desperation. I’d broken with the woman, but I imagined that we were both better off for it. Royce would not have been happy with this rationalization. It reeked of a warped sort of hubris about making moral commitments—that promises could be broken so long as one could master the art of post hoc justification, when it was actually just immature and self-deceptive. Atonement was something else entirely. Atonement was to recognize that you’d freely, consciously done the wrong thing, and then to exercise your freedom, in light of that mistake, to try to make the world a slightly better place. To be clear, this isn’t the banal platitude that one has to learn from one’s mistakes or, more galling, that suffering is necessary for our moral education. It’s the attempt to integrate the past, with all its not-so-little tragedies, into a more promising future.
I turned away from the chest, toward the rustling on the other side of the attic. Disloyalty was to be avoided, but if you commit treason against a cause, according to Royce, this treachery is an occasion to deepen, rather than abandon, your ties of loyalty. I thought about a letter from George Herbert Palmer, another of Hocking’s Harvard professors. Early in his relationship with Agnes, Ernest had confided to his mentor that he and his new wife were having a little trouble. Palmer responded with an appeal to genuine loyalty: “Differences are an enrichment, if in every jar you can take refuge in one another.
” During my first trips to the attic, in the midst of a disintegrating marriage, I’d wholly missed this possibility.
I made my way out of the eaves and straightened to my full height. Something cool brushed across my cheek, a metal chain hanging from the ceiling. I grabbed it and pulled gently. The entire attic lit up. Years of fighting darkness with headlamps, and only now was I discovering the lights.
* * *
I left Fanny behind and joined Carol where she was rooting through a shelf of books written by a woman who had only recently regained her rightful place in the canon of American philosophy. Earlier that week, Jennifer had suggested that we explore the corner of the loft that held the “Addams stuff.” I knew who Jane Addams was: the founder of Chicago’s Hull House in the 1880s and one of the very few women who is now regarded as an American philosopher. But I didn’t know she had a Hocking connection. In the late 1880s, Jennifer explained, Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr envisioned a settlement house that was modeled on Toynbee Hall, in London, established in 1884. But Addams’s house would be for women, and her settlement would grow in tandem with the progressive educational ideals being developed at the time by John Dewey at the University of Chicago. It was a good plan, but they needed a building. They finally got one when a wealthy woman, Helen Culver, decided to first rent and then donate the Hull family home, on Halsted Street in Chicago’s Near West Side, to Addams and Starr. Culver’s nephew, Charles Hull Ewing, continued to oversee the Hull House Association at the turn of the century. Ewing’s daughter, Katherine, married Richard Hocking in 1939, making Ewing Jennifer’s grandfather. The “Addams stuff” were all the clippings, letters, and books Jane Addams had sent to Culver.