Chan Marshall Quotes

In Allston, as generous as he was with his praise and encouragement, Sophia had come face-to-face with the male art establishment and its aesthetic. She had encountered it before when she was hustled out of Thomas Doughty’s studio while a men’s painting class was in session. More recently, at a gathering in the Reverend Channing’s parlor, she had been stunned when the minister had quoted the influential British artist Henry Fuseli’s sneering observation that there was “no fist” in women’s painting—and then demanded Sophia’s response. Flustered, Sophia had “sunk away into my shell,” unable to speak, she confided in her journal. She had enough trouble summoning the confidence to paint each day, let alone defend women artists as a class. Channing’s question struck to the heart of Sophia’s ambivalence about taking the initiative to create original works of art. Virtually

Unconsciously, perhaps inevitably, Sophia accepted Allston’s standard. For Sophia, it had always been Doughty and Harding and Allston who were “masterly.” They “embodied” art in a way that the turbaned Catherine Scollay in her attic studio never could. If women had a recognized place in the art world it was as muse or model—or wife. Yet, with the exception of the Reverend Channing’s question, no one spoke of art in terms of gender. Because it was unacknowledged, the gap between a young woman with talent and a man of accomplishment could seem an unbridgeable chasm. It was safer for Sophia to paint covers for ladies’ card cases or, at most, copy paintings that offered a thrilling proximity to greatness. Neither would require an open admission of her own aspirations to greatness—aspirations that could easily go unfulfilled in the absence of adequate training. Sophia had seen what had happened to her oldest sister, whose naked desire to become “all and more than all, that those she loved would have her be” had exposed her to disappointment and failure. Sophia would not risk that. In

Mary was relieved to see Elizabeth so steadily engaged. “She has been living this winter upon Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dr. Channing,” Mary

something quite radical for her time and place: that personal choice and individual freedom were innate, and fully consistent with social responsibility and a “Godly” way of life. Following from the discussion she’d had with Channing about Coleridge’s term transcendental, she called her new philosophy “transcendentalism.

As a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher feeling grateful for a growing “intimacy” with the man whose mind she most admired, Elizabeth contented herself with Channing’s praise. Indeed, she was “startled with mingled terror & delight” by his words, she wrote. She did not stop to question his instructions to employ her “deeper insights” in service to others. Elizabeth was ready to dispute orthodox theology, but not to challenge the social orthodoxy that told her teaching school was the single suitable occupation for a woman of intellect, especially when Channing himself upheld the convention.

During their weekly conversations, Channing introduced Elizabeth to the work of the British Romantic poets—especially Coleridge and Wordsworth, who had befriended Channing as the apostle of a new American spirituality during his 1822 tour of Europe. He loaned Elizabeth a volume of Coleridge’s essays, and they discussed the poet’s use of the word transcendental. Channing was grappling with the concept in his own theology, and he confided to Elizabeth that he now believed “the idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity. In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity.