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Caroline Sturgis Tappan

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Caroline Sturgis Tappan (August 30, 1818 - October 20, 1888), commonly known as Caroline Sturgis, or "Cary" Sturgis, was an American Transcendentalist, poet, and artist.[1][2][3] Caroline Sturgis was born in Boston, Massachusetts to the former Elizabeth Marsten Davis Sturgis (1789-1864), the second daughter of Judge John Davis, a U.S. District Judge for the District of Massachusetts, and William F. Sturgis (1782-1863), a former sea captain who rose to become one of the wealthiest and most successful merchants in Boston.[4][5] Known for her friendships and frequent correspondences with prominent American Transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sturgis published 25 poems in four different volumes of The Dial and two books for children, Rainbows for Children (1847) and The Magician’s Show Box, and Other Stories (1856).[6] Bowing to the dictates of her class and its restrictions on gender, Sturgis did not reveal her authorship of these two books, attributing them instead to her friend Lydia Maria Child.[7] She attended Bronson Alcott's Temple School, Dorothy Dix's school for girls, became Margaret Fuller's private student,[8] and she participated in Fuller's Conversations series with her sister Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848). Recent research has shown that Sturgis had a greater influence on Transcendentalist thought than previously acknowledged, particularly on Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose journals and poems provide evidence of his deep respect for her.[9][10]

Biography

Caroline Sturgis was a middle child of Captain William and Elizabeth Sturgis, who had six children, William Watson (1810-1827), Ellen (1812-1848), Anne (1813-1884), Caroline (1818-1888), Mary Louisa (1820-1870), and Susan (1825-1853).[11] William Watson, first-born son and his father’s beloved namesake, was killed at sixteen in a boating accident of the coast of Provincetown in 1827, when the boom of the boat suddenly gibed, hitting him in the head.[12] William and Elizabeth lived separately for a period after the accident, and although Elizabeth eventually returned to live with her husband, the family never recovered from this tragedy.[13]

Margaret Fuller formally introduced Sturgis to Emerson in the winter of 1837, during his course of lectures on Human Culture at Boston’s Masonic Temple.[10] Emerson knew her father from his time working as a minister in Boston and in previous visits to the Sturgis family, so he likely knew Caroline Sturgis when she was a child.[14] Emerson and his then fiancée Lydia Jackson were honored at a party at the Sturgis home on March 5, 1835, following Emerson’s lecture on Burke at Boston’s Masonic Temple, the sixth in his series on biography given for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.[15][16][17] The friendship between Sturgis and Emerson grew, and they spent a great deal of time in conversation. Sturgis sometimes stayed in the Emerson family home while visiting Concord, and when she and Emerson were apart, they wrote to each other, continuing their discussions of philosophy and literature, such as Bettina von Arnim's Goethe's Correspondence with a Child.[18]

Sturgis was Margaret Fuller's primary confidante, a companion on Fuller's trip to the Great Lakes,[19] after which Fuller wrote Summer on the Lakes, and she was a catalyst to many of Fuller's ideas about art, women, mysticism, and more.[20] Both women loved one another in a romantic friendship similar to what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg describes in "The Female World of Love and Ritual."[20][21] Sturgis and her sister, Ellen, participated in Fuller's Conversations series.

Sturgis spent the summer of 1845 boarding at The Old Manse while Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody lived there, and remained friends with the Hawthornes.[22]

In 1847, Sturgis married William Aspinwall Tappan, son of abolitionist Lewis Tappan and Susanna Aspinwall, and they had two daughters, Ellen Sturgis Tappan Hooper (b. 1849) and Mary Aspinwall Tappan (1851-1941).[23][24] Mary, with her niece Rosamund Dixey Brooks Hepburn (1887-1948), later donated the family summer home, Tanglewood, in the Berkshires to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.[25][26]

References

  1. ^ Hudspeth, Richard N. (1983). The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Vol. 2. Ithaca: Cornell UP. p. 47.
  2. ^ Lawrence, Kathleen (2004). Bloom, Harold (ed.). “Margaret Fuller’s Aesthetic Transcendentalism and Its Legacy”. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Press. pp. 273–95.
  3. ^ Richardson, Robert D. (November 6, 1995). Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 325. ISBN 978-0520206892.
  4. ^ Loring, Charles G. (1864). Memoir of the Hon William Sturgis. Press of John Wilson and Son. pp. 42–44.
  5. ^ Dedmond, Francis B. (1988). "The Letters of Caroline Sturgis to Margaret Fuller". Studies in the American Renaissance: 201–251. JSTOR 30227564.
  6. ^ Myerson, Joel (1980). The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.
  7. ^ Houghton Library, Sturgis-Tappan Papers.
  8. ^ Marshall, Megan (2014). Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 115. ISBN 978-0544245617.
  9. ^ Marshall, Megan (May 11, 2006). The Peabody Sisters. Mariner Books. p. 296. ISBN 978-0618711697.
  10. ^ a b Lawrence, Kathleen (2005). ""The 'Dry-Lighted Soul' Ignites: Emerson and His Soul-Mate Caroline Sturgis As Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts."". Harvard Library Bulletin. 16.3: 37–67.
  11. ^ Sturgis family Bible, Sturgis Papers, Sturgis Library, Barnstable.
  12. ^ Sturgis family Bible, Sturgis Papers, Sturgis Library, Barnstable.
  13. ^ Dedmond, Francis B. (1988). "The Letters of Caroline Sturgis to Margaret Fuller". Studies in the American Renaissance: 202.
  14. ^ Dedmond, Francis B. (1988). "The Letters of Caroline Sturgis to Margaret Fuller". Studies in the American Renaissance: 203. JSTOR 30227564.
  15. ^ Carpenter, Delores Bird, ed. (1987). The Selected Letters of Lidian Jackson Emerson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, p. 24.
  16. ^ Charvat, William (1961). Emerson’s American Lecture Engagements: A Chronological List. New York: New York Public Library, p. 15.
  17. ^ Argersinger, Jana; Cole, Phyllis, eds. (2014). "Introduction". Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press. p. 19.
  18. ^ Miller, Perry (1957). The American transcendentalists : Their prose and poetry. Garden City: Doubleday anchor books. p. 275.
  19. ^ Wider, Sarah Ann (2014). ""How it All Lies Before Me Today": Transcendentalist Women's Journeys into Attention". In Argersinger, Jana; Cole, Phyllis (eds.). Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press. p. 157.
  20. ^ a b Lawrence, Kathleen (2011). "Soul Sisters and the Sister Arts: Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, and Their Private World of Love and Art". ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. 57 (1): 79–104. doi:10.1353/esq.2011.0020.
  21. ^ Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll (Autumn 1975). "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America". Signs. 1: 1–29. doi:10.1086/493203.
  22. ^ Wayne, Tiffany K. (May 14, 2014). Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism: The Essential Guide to the Lives and Works of Transcendentalist Writers. New York: Infobase Publishing. p. 275.
  23. ^ "Sturgis-Tappan Family Papers, 1812-1982". Five College Archives & Manuscript Collection. Retrieved February 28, 2018.
  24. ^ "Caroline Sturgis Tappan". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 28 February 2019.
  25. ^ "Tanglewood Music Festival - People Who Made it Happen". Lenox History. February 10, 2016. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
  26. ^ Pendle, Karin (2001). Women & Music: A History (Second ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 490.
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