THE REDISCOVERY OF MARGARET FULLER

By Joseph Jay Deiss, Christian Science Monitor, January 21, 1974 

These are days when Margaret Fuller, America's first liberated woman, may well come into her own at last — that full flowering she found so impossible even in transcendental New England. The current rediscovery of Margaret coincides with the demands of our times. She was a woman who defied a man's world to express herself as a woman. In her short life (1810-1850) she did her "own thing" in Cambridge, in Boston, in New York, in Europe — to the horror of many and the delight of some.

Always candid about her feelings, she wrote to her friend William Henry Channing - "I love best to be a woman, but womanhood at present is too straitly bound to give me scope. At hours I live truly as a woman, at others I stifle. . . Men disappoint me so. I weary in this playground of boys! . . . I wish I were a man and then there would be one."

Margaret stretched the bounds of 19th-century womanhood to its limits. Her life was full of firsts for an American woman. She was the first woman to be admitted to the Harvard College library. She was the first woman in a public position to deplore the evil treatment of red men. As editor of the transcendentalist Dial, she was the first woman magazine editor. As crusading columnist and critic for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, she was not only the first woman journalist but the first paid literary critic of either sex. Traveling abroad for Greeley, she was the first woman foreign correspondent.

Her dispatches covering the French siege of Rome in 1849 made her the first woman war correspondent. She became an underground agent of the exiled Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, and thus the first American woman partisan in a foreign revolution. Her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), was the first vigorous plea for women's rights in America; it was a sensation.

It could not have failed to vex and stir her contemporaries when she flatly demanded “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.” One of her extraordinary insights especially enraged the male chauvinists of her time. “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

Margaret and Ralph Waldo Emerson were intimate friends, as newly published letters have shown. Yet he considered her “strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling.” He ignored her grace and elegance and could not understand why European men found her fascinating.

For this reason he was shocked by the belated news of Margaret's marriage to an Italian nobleman. Giovanni Angelo Ossoli was a decade younger, a marquis, and a follower of Mazzini, defying his aristocratic Papal family. Angelo fought on the walls of Rome — while Margaret, as directress of a military hospital, dreaded the arrival of every cartload of wounded.

When eventually the French invaders breached the walls and proclaimed the temporal restoration of Pope Pius IX, Angelo and Margaret escaped with their lives. Amazingly Margaret was able to provide an American passport not only for her Angelo but for the much-hunted Giuseppe Mazzini himself.

Angelo had been disinherited and Margaret had been dropped from the Tribune, so they were almost totally without funds. Nevertheless Margaret completed her book, A History of the Roman Liberation and then, against the advice of Emerson, took passage for America to sell the manuscript. The night before landing in New York, the ship was driven ashore on Fire Island by a gale. Margaret refused rescue without her husband and child. The baby's body was washed on the beach still warm, but the bodies of Angelo and Margaret were never found.

While Emerson wrote plaintively in his journal, “I have lost in her my audience,” another of Margaret's friends, Henry David Thoreau, rushed to Fire Island to search the sands for her manuscript. Only her unconstrained love letters, in Italian, turned up. The undoubtedly great historical work had disappeared forever.

Shortly after Margaret's death, Emerson, with William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke, undertook to edit a so-called Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. However well-intentioned, the result was a disaster for Margaret. Her letters and journals were so scissored and blue-penciled that the warm and human Margaret became hardly recognizable. A false image, an egocentric intellectual, had taken her place. That image has persisted until recent years when a fresh appraisal, with new facts, has begun.

Once Margaret wrote "I remembered how, a little child, I had stopped myself on the stairs and asked, ‘how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?”

In retrospect, she was writing not about herself alone, but about all those who seek meaning in life —then and now. For herself, by her actions, she answered the questions. For us, it is our good fortune that she can help us to answer the same questions for ourselves.

Joseph Jay Deiss, former vice-director of the American Academy in Rome, has written “The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller,” “Herculaneum, Italy's Buried Treasure,” “The Great Infidel Frederick II.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction, other than for use with the Learning activities, is prohibited without permission.

A WRITER, THINKER, AND TRAILBLAZER

By Jenny Rankin

Boston Globe - Boston, Massachusetts, May 24, 2010

IN ROME this week, on a speck of an island in the Tiber River, Italians pause to celebrate an American they see as a heroine. In 1849, Margaret Fuller ran a hospital on that island where she ministered to Garibaldi's forces fighting the French.

There is even more reason over here to remember Fuller, who was born in Cambridge 200 years ago yesterday. Fuller is now seen as America's first female public intellectual. Fuller said women were constrained and diminished by a society that failed to see their true powers. She urged women to be all they could be. "Let them be sea captains" was her public cry - and a private credo. "Very early," she said, "I knew that the only object in life was to grow."

As a thinker and writer, Fuller is on a par with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Some called her arrogant and self-involved, while others said in Fuller's company they felt more truly "themselves" than ever before. Fuller drew out their deepest confidences.

She put her imprint on that distinctively American school of thought, transcendentalism. But, like so many women in history, she is overlooked and misunderstood to this day.

The oldest of nine children, Fuller was educated at home. She studied Latin at 6. By 12, she was winning prizes at Dr. Park's elite school for girls on Mt. Vernon Street, a tendency to compete that did not always make her popular with her peers. She inhaled books with a voracity rivaling that of her peer, Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker. Unlike Parker, however, Fuller could not attend Harvard College. Nor could she become a Unitarian minister. As a bright and sometimes awkward teenager (a friend called her "bumptious"), she took her education into her own hands and drove herself hard. Determined to translate Goethe for an American audience, Fuller stayed up nights to learn German. Emerson praised her work, calling it "a beneficent action for which America will long thank you."

Fuller's father died when she was 25. She stepped in as head of the household and needed to earn money. She went to Concord to visit Emerson - the first of 14 visits over nine years. Alcott invited her to teach at his progressive school. Quickly, Fuller moved to the center of that circle of women and men, the transcendentalists, whose spiritual and intellectual energy was lighting the New England sky.

Years later, Emerson remembered vividly his first meeting with her. She had an unfortunate trick, he said, of rapidly opening and closing her eyes, but still, he told his brother, to be with someone so intelligent was "a great refreshment." "It is like being set in a large place. You stretch your limbs and dilate to your utmost size."

Fuller left New England, first for New York, working for Horace Greeley's New York Herald Tribune and publishing "Woman in the Nineteenth Century." While there, she had a brief but tortured relationship with New York businessman James Nathan. Fortunately, it didn't last. London and Paris were next.

Fuller, the first female foreign correspondent, sent home dispatches from prisons and factories, told of new trends in art and literature. In Rome, she found "the home of my soul" and also met Giovanni Ossoli when she got lost outside St. Peter's at twilight. They fell in love, and Fuller became pregnant and retreated to a hill town, Rieti, to give birth. Scholars surmise that she and Ossoli married at some point, but Fuller kept the baby a secret from all for more than a year.

As the Italian rebellion gained force in 1849, foreigners fled Rome. Not Fuller. She stayed to care for wounded patriots in her island hospital. During the siege, Fuller had left her infant son, Angelino, back in Rieti with a nurse.

This spring, I saw the holes made by French cannonballs in the old stone walls of Rome. I saw Fuller's hospital, and I stood on the ramparts that Garibaldi's men, including Ossoli, defended.

No trans-Atlantic ticket is required, however, to see evidence of Fuller's life in Massachusetts. Go to her Cherry Street birthplace in Cambridgeport, or to the Emerson house, in Concord, where, as they sipped tea, Fuller and friends talked out ideas that would change America.

Fuller's life was cut short when, sailing home from Italy, her ship - loaded with Carrera marble - hit a sandbar off Fire Island and went down. She, Ossoli and their 2-year-old son drowned. Emerson sent Thoreau the next day to look for her manuscript on the Italian Revolution. It was never found. All Thoreau brought back to Concord was a button from Ossoli's greatcoat.

Fuller was as human as any of us. She faced obstacles and had struggles. She knew how the limitations society put on women could be soul-killing. Yet she was a person of spiritual courage and an inspiration to American women who refused to be made smaller than they really were.

Jenny Rankin is minister at First Parish in Concord, Unitarian Universalist.

Reproduced with permission of the author.

Selection from a Letter by Margaret Fuller to Jane Tuckerman, as excerpted in The Spirit Leads: Margaret Fuller in Her Own Words, Barry Andrews, editor.[1

...

It was Thanksgiving day, (Nov., 1831,) and I was obliged to go to church, or exceedingly displease my father. I almost always suffered much in church from a feeling of disunion with the hearers and dis­sent from the preacher; but to-day, more than ever before, the services jarred upon me from their grateful and joyful tone. I was wearied out with mental conflicts, and in a mood of most childish, child-like sad­ness. I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness; but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet I could not remem­ber ever voluntarily to have done a wrong thing, and my aspiration seemed very high. I looked round the church, and envied all the little children; for I supposed they had parents who protected them, so that they could never know this strange anguish, this dread uncertainty. I knew not, then, that none could have any father but God. I knew not, that I was not the only lonely one, that I was not the selected Oedipus, the special victim of an iron law. I was in haste for all to be over, that I might get into the free air.

I walked away over the fields as fast as I could walk. This was my custom at that time, when I could no longer bear the weight of my feel­ings, and fix my attention on any pursuit; for I do believe I never vol­untarily gave way to these thoughts one moment. The force I exerted I think, even now, greater than I ever knew in any other character. But when I could bear myself no longer, I walked many hours, till the anguish was wearied out, and I returned in a state of prayer. To-day all seemed to have reached its height. It seemed as if I could never return to a world in which I had no place, -- to the mockery of humanities. I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer. It was a sad and sallow day of the late autumn. Slow processions of sad clouds were passing over a cold blue sky; the hues of earth were dull, and gray, and brown, with sickly struggles of late green here and there; sometimes a moan­ing gust of wind drove late, reluctant leaves across the path; -- there was no life else. In the sweetness of my present peace, such days seem to me made to tell man the worst of his lot; but still that November wind can bring a chill of memory.

I paused beside a little stream, which I had envied in the merry ful­lness of its spring life. It was shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves. I marveled that it did not quite lose itself in the earth. There was no stay for me, and I went on and on, till I came to where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. I sat down there. I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still. Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed from me. I remembered how, a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it MUST do it, -- that it must make all this false true, -- and sow new and immortal plants in the garden of God, before it could return again. I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God. In that true ray most of the relations of earth seemed mere films, phenomena.

My earthly pain at not being recognized never went deep after this hour. I had passed the extreme of passionate sorrow; and all check, all failure, all ignorance, have seemed temporary ever since. When I consider that this will be nine years ago next November, I am aston­ished that I have not gone on faster since; that I am not yet sufficiently purified to be taken back to God. Still, I did but touch then on the only haven of Insight. You know what I would say. I was dwelling in the ineffable, the unutterable. But the sun of earth set, and it grew dark around; the moment came for me to go. I had never been accustomed to walk alone at night, for my father was very strict on that subject, but now I had not one fear. When I came back, the moon was riding clear above the houses. I went into the churchyard, and there offered a prayer as holy, if not as deeply true, as any I know now; a prayer, which perhaps took form as the guardian angel of my life. If that word in the Bible, Selah, means what gray-headed old men think it does, when they read aloud, it should be written here, -- Selah!

Since that day, I have never more been completely engaged in self; but the statue has been emerging, though slowly, from the block. Oth­ers may not see the promise even of its pure symmetry, but I do, and am learning to be patient. I shall be all human yet; and then the hour will come to leave humanity, and live always in the pure ray . . . .

Since then I have suffered, as I must suffer again, till all the com­plex be made simple, but I have never been in discord with the grand harmony.

Reproduced with permission from the editor.

AHEAD OF HER TIME

By Bell Gale Chevigny

Boston Globe - Boston, Massachusetts, July 17, 2000

One hundred fifty years ago, in the early hours of July 19, a storm drove the freighter Elizabeth onto a sandbar near Fire Island, the cargo of Carrara marble broke through the hold, and the ship stuck fast, pitched sideways. When the light came up, the voyagers could make out the pirates lining the shore, waiting for loot, but no rescuer braved the waves.

Clinging to planks, some passengers survived, but one, refusing to abandon her small child, went down with the ship.

This was the brilliant and bold Margaret Fuller, dead at 40. A Massachusetts original, she was our first woman to be a major public intellectual. She had dedicated her considerable talents to exploring the potential of the American Revolution and fostering a more inclusive democracy.

Precocious and high-spirited in the heady days of Transcendentalism, Fuller taught in experimental schools and, editing the Dial, promoted "immoral" writers like Byron, Goethe, and George Sand. She gave talks at the utopian community Brook Farm and made Emerson laugh more than he liked. Her celebrated conversations for wives and daughters of Boston ministers and reformers - a cross between seminar and salon - taught participants to "think aloud." Edgar Allen Poe is said to have remarked: "There are three species: men, women, and Margaret Fuller."

An outsider to power, Fuller understood the plight of the excluded and the contributions their inclusion might bring. All of her work challenged our fledgling democracy to bring new human potential into the world. Fuller's ground-breaking "Women in the Nineteenth Century," published in 1845, applied the Declaration of Independence to women, calling Americans to "rise above the belief that woman was made for man."

Dependence on men, she wrote, "has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other."

Racial supremacy troubled her on a visit to the Great Lakes. In "Summer on the Lakes" in 1843 she assailed the materialism of the Western pioneers and lauded the Native Americans, with their respect for the land, as exemplary settlers. In the prejudice of whites she discerned the dynamics of racism: the "aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded."

When this book inspired Horace Greeley to offer her a star position on The New York Tribune, Fuller took on slavery, the war in Mexico, capital punishment, and our national arrogance, arguing that they betrayed American principles. She wrote sympathetically about the disenfranchised - the poor, the mentally ill, women imprisoned at Sing-Sing, African-Americans, and immigrants. Once we accept ourselves as a "mixed race, continually enriched with new blood from other stocks," she argued, America will develop a unique culture.

Going abroad in 1846 as foreign correspondent, Fuller introduced Tribune readers to progressive ideas and experiments - workers' schools, day-care centers, public laundries - she encountered in Great Britain, France, and Italy.

In 1848, while the United States struck her as "spoiled with prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, and soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery," its revolutionary spirit seemed to have leaped the Atlantic to inflame the republican insurgents of France, Austria, and Italy. Of the heroic defense of the Roman Republic, she wrote, "This is what makes my America."

To reinvigorate US idealism, this cosmopolitan urged informed attention to other peoples for her nation's own integrity and growth.

Her passionate defense of the Roman Republic, her condemnation of the French invasion to overthrow it, her direction of a hospital for the wounded - all this excited controversy among Tribune readers.

After Rome fell in 1849, many in her circle were scandalized by belated news of her union with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a captain of the radical Civic Guard, and of the birth in secret of their son. Fuller, Ossoli, and their child took refuge in Florence before setting out on their ill-fated voyage.

For more than a century she was caricatured and her work distorted. Recently her foresight has sparked a return to her work, and for the first time all of her provocative writing is available. Her struggle against supremacy - whether of gender, race, class, or nation - and her commitment to engaging all people in fruitful dialogue speak powerfully to our enduring national troubles.

Abstract (Document Summary)

Precocious and high-spirited in the heady days of Transcendentalism, [Margaret Fuller] taught in experimental schools and, editing the Dial, promoted "immoral" writers like Byron, Goethe, and George Sand. She gave talks at the utopian community Brook Farm and made Emerson laugh more than he liked. Her celebrated conversations for wives and daughters of Boston ministers and reformers - a cross between seminar and salon - taught participants to "think aloud." Edgar Allen Poe is said to have remarked: "There are three species: men, women, and Margaret Fuller."

An outsider to power, Fuller understood the plight of the excluded and the contributions their inclusion might bring. All of her work challenged our fledgling democracy to bring new human potential into the world. Fuller's ground-breaking "Women in the Nineteenth Century," published in 1845, applied the Declaration of Independence to women, calling Americans to "rise above the belief that woman was made for man."

When this book inspired Horace Greeley to offer her a star position on The New York Tribune, Fuller took on slavery, the war in Mexico, capital punishment, and our national arrogance, arguing that they betrayed American principles. She wrote sympathetically about the disenfranchised - the poor, the mentally ill, women imprisoned at Sing-Sing, African-Americans, and immigrants. Once we accept ourselves as a "mixed race, continually enriched with new blood from other stocks," she argued, America will develop a unique culture.

Bell Gale Chevigny is a professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College, State University of New York and is author of "The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's life and Writings."

Reproduced with permission of the author.