From: The Woman and The Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life & Writings (1994)
Author: Bell Gale Chevigny, Margaret Fuller
Published: Northeastern University Press 1976; 1994 Boston
INTRODUCTION
In the hundred and twenty-six years since her death Margaret Fuller has been neither forgotten nor understood. In American Studies she is generally recalled as a handmaiden to major talents, a sole female figure in the frieze of minor Transcendentalists, necessarily blue-stockinged because she edited The Dial, their literary magazine. There is something quaintly outrageous too in her remembrance, coming from the uses Hawthorne and James made of her in some of their colorful, pretentious, or daring female characters. More recently Fuller is recalled in women’s history surveys as author of one of the first book-length tracts on the condition of American women or inventor of consciousness-raising groups in her Conversations for women.
But whether our point of departure is the American Renaissance or feminism, the most cursory study of her life and work is surprising and provocative. Looking at her as a Transcendentalist, we find that her extraordinary erudition and articulate originality were widely recognized and honored by publication of her work and her inclusion in virtually any intellectual circle she chose. Yet we learn that this privilege did not fully satisfy her. Indeed, as Emerson wrote, with penetrating candor, she caused them all “some uneasiness, as if this athletic soul craved an atmosphere larger than it found.”1 For Margaret Fuller had a driving and adventurous temperament which led her to travel west to write about the Indians and the frontier settlements and later to become the New York Tribune’s first female reporter. Finally, this centrifugal restlessness carried her to Europe, where, in the last four years of her life, she became a close friend of controversial figures (George Sand, Adam Mickiewicz, and Giuseppe Mazzini among them), a skillful analyst and propagandist of the Italian revolution of 1848 a director of a hospital for the wounded in Rome, the lover of a partisan, and a mother. Returning with this family, she died at forty in a shipwreck only fifty yards from American shore. Our interest deepens if we are able to see, beneath these almost melodramatic events, how her writing and her life itself in Europe offered a far-reaching criticism of the Transcendentalism from which she had sprung.
As a feminist too she may surprise us. For Fuller experienced feminism as a part of her growth, not as an end in itself. She engaged in her most concentrated feminist activity—conducting the Conversations and writing Woman in the Nineteenth Century—at the time that she was liberating herself from the circumscribed intellectual life of New England. Psychologically, Fuller’s feminist activity supported her as she claimed for herself greater freedom than probably any woman of her class and generation in America enjoyed. Intellectually, her feminism was a way station, an early exercise in social criticism which led her to live out a much more comprehensive critique of American values. While her concern for women and their rights remained alive in her last years, it engrossed her less than it had, for it was translated into other terms. On the one hand it expanded to a concern for all oppressed people, on the other it contracted into the need—directly, without theory, and alone—to complete her own freedom.
Today we can understand Margaret Fuller’s life and work as a paradigm both of the problems Americans had in developing political or social ideas and of the problematic position of middle-class American women. One object of this book is to attend more than others have done to the evolution of Fuller’s political and social thought, exploring the dynamics that moved her through idealism to a critical or radical realism.2 As an idealist, Fuller concentrated on the perfection of herself and those around her and on living in terms of universal and timeless values. Idealism made her interest in society incidental, ·discontinuous, and always abstract. As a realist, Fuller concentrated on specific historical and material conditions as they shaped society; her realism became radical or critical when she identified social facts and forces concealed by national institutions and ideology and called for responsive action and policy. Radical realism indirectly fed her personal development as no direct self-culture had done, but self-culture was no longer a primary objective. The seeds of a radical realism were always there, but they did not grow until she left New England and, eventually, America. In part, they grew because of differences in the kinds of experience and thought available to her in America and in Europe.
A second object requires that we reverse the usual practice of seeing Margaret Fuller as a fascinating exception to the condition of American women of her time. Much made Fuller unusual: the complexity of her personality (at once flamboyant and tormented), her driving energy, the versatility of her talents, the range of her opportunities, the many stages of her development, and, above all, her skill and courage in naming her feelings, speaking her mind. But these qualities are most interesting for what they reveal about the feelings of ordinary American women of her class: their restlessness, ambitions, and frustrations. What was extraordinary about Fuller was the relative success she had in resolving these feelings. From this perspective her life has the mythic quality of a woman who lived two lives or who died and returned a few generations later to complete her life with a distinctly modernized sensibility. But it was space, not time, that made the difference. For in Italy she acted out her character, in her words—taking a lover and joining the revolution—as she had not been able to do, either politically or privately, in America.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the problem of an American woman who wanted to develop all her faculties and tum them to active use was so great that Fuller could not really identify it as long as she stayed in her own country. But Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau were among the foreign analysts who saw acutely the circumstances of American women in the 1830s when Fuller, in her early twenties, was living a problem the more oppressive and insidious because she could not name it. At first sight, the experience of the British Martineau who found Americans’ treatment of women beneath their own democratic theory and the practice of parts of Europe, seems to have nothing in common with that of the Gallic Tocqueville who attributed the singular prosperity and strength of Americans to “the superiority of their women.”3 But then we discover remarkable similarity in their actual findings, which the differences in their sex and political complexion led them to evaluate differently.
Tocqueville’s argument is the subtler one. As a “puritanical people and a commercial nation,” Americans had a double motive for binding women in conventional marriages: the needs to ensure the purity of their morals and to secure order and prosperity in the home. But as a democratic nation, placing high value on individual independence, they believed “they had little chance of repressing in women the most vehement passions of the human heart.” The only sure way to bring up a proper woman, then, “was to teach her the art of combating those passions for herself,” by placing “more reliance . . . on the free vigor of her will than on safeguards which have been shaken or overthrown,” by arming her reason as well as her virtue. So reared, the young unmarried woman revealed a freedom of mind and action unmatched in Europe. But as a wife she was more submissive, dependent, dutiful, and conformist than her European counterpart. How was this change effected? By the young woman herself, who, in the culminating exercise of her virtue, reason, and free will, chose such marriage. Tocqueville found that, far from seeming to feel degraded by this choice of unfreedom, American women “attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will, and make it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off.” Although Tocqueville observed that this system might produce in young women alarming forwardness and in wives a cold virtue, he admired what he took to be their freedom of choice.4
To modern readers, Tocqueville seems to be seduced by the very sophistry he so precisely describes. He seems indifferent to the fact that he is anatomizing a gigantic cultural con, in which half the population is persuaded to believe that conditioning, however moral and thoughtful, is freedom. We have here an early and extreme expression of America’s repressive tolerance, where the very ideology of freedom functions to limit it; it is extreme because in this case woman herself assures the inefficacy of her freedom.
Martineau’s analysis is more straightforward because she never saw the American woman’s choice of marriage as a free one. While she agreed with Tocqueville that it was the single role women prepare themselves for, she did not believe it was freely chosen; there were virtually no viable alternatives, and women were denied the moral and intellectual training necessary to choose freely. With Tocqueville, she recognized Americans’ pride in the achievement of their women, but she saw it as springing from their willful unconsciousness of the real situation. “While woman’s intellect is confined, her morals crushed, her health ruined, her weaknesses encouraged, and her strength punished, she is told that her lot is cast in the paradise of women.”5 Needless to say, Martineau remarked on no significant difference between the freedom of young women and that of wives.
While Fuller would ultimately arrive at a position closer to Martineau’s, at twenty-one she would probably have agreed with Tocqueville’s assessment of the moral and intellectual independence of unmarried women. Her training and early associates so fed her independent spirit and strong will that one can well imagine her boldness intimidating Tocqueville, had they met. But beyond this point, she and Tocqueville parted company. For Fuller, the goal of the girl’s independence was not proud womanly surrender of the will but simply the woman’s independence—the pursuit of an open destiny and the discovery of a life expressive, not repressive, of the self. Margaret Fuller’s problem was the problem of all American women who wanted to realize in their adult life an ideology of freedom which was intended simply to be a plaything of their youth. It was a problem because of the cultural law Tocqueville pointed to: the religious and economic objectives which defined the American nation necessarily defined woman as well—as a creature destined for marriage and fulfilled and useful only in the family circle. To conceive of women differently was tantamount therefore to challenging the assumptions on which the nation was built. Ultimately Fuller did this, implicitly challenging the religious assumptions by her sexual behavior, explicitly questioning the economic assumptions, and especially their social and political corollaries, in her writing from Italy.
The struggle that preceded Fuller’s challenge to the American conception of woman is as interesting as the challenge itself. For the woman who dreamed of an adult freedom not embodied in the wife or her attendants, the governess and the teacher, more was involved than nonconformity. She had to create a way of life not yet possible and a self whose nature was without local example. Moving, often unconsciously, toward a life that did not yet exist in America, such women lived in effect with the unreal, and often they turned the sense of unreality against themselves. American women who did not capitulate to the marital yoke often compensated by bending their necks to other family yokes, offering their services to the brothers or sisters who would support them. Some passed through emotional crises, or suffered from ill-defined sicknesses—often while contradictorily burning with energy—or turned their religious impulse destructively on themselves or on persons near them. In various seasons of her life, Fuller took each of these routes, which became the life-stories of many women.
In the years immediately following Fuller’s departure from America, women like her met together to form a movement precisely to create a basis in American life for freedom for women. What made this possible was the shared recognition of their problem by women, who thus filled each other with a nascent sense of reality which was the beginning of power. Just preceding this movement, Fuller missed its stabilizing and affirming benefits. Because her life was more marked by extremes, perhaps it is more revealing than those of the organized feminists.
Her prayer, “Give me truth, cheat me by no illusion,” at once humble and boastful, conveys what Fuller knew she needed most, for vying with her passion for truth was her susceptibility to illusion. Sometimes the illusion was that jewel held out to all American women—the idea that by accepting limitations defined for them by others they were indeed fulfilling themselves; at other times the illusion was of her own devising. Historical opportunity combined with her drive for clarity to very nearly free her from both sorts of illusion.
This collection of writings is designed to trace the struggle to conceive and act out of free womanhood, by showing how Margaret Fuller construed her problem and by examining, one at a time, the various identities she assumed in an effort to resolve the struggle. Though Fuller did not enter these created roles as separate rooms, but always explored her opportunities for freedom on many levels at once, it seems useful, despite overlaps, to examine each singly. And she did pursue a free vocation in roughly chronological experiments, trying first friendship, elevated nearly into art; second, Transcendentalism with its attendant opportunities of teaching, writing literary criticism, and editing the journal of that group; third, the invention of an American feminism; fourth, the practice of social criticism, mostly as a journalist; and finally, commitment to radicalism, to liberation, both political and sexual, in Italy. In this progression we see her moving gradually and erratically from virtually complete compliance with the accepted roles for women to a life which challenged the very basis of the culture and began to make the conception of different roles possible.
This anthology is divided into six parts corresponding to Fuller’s sense of the problem of identity and vocation and her five approaches to resolving it. Further, in each part her writing is prefaced by a sample of relevant writings about her by her contemporaries. Each part includes a wide variety of materials—reminiscences, journal entries, letters, fragments of fiction, essays, reportage—which illuminate her interpretation of each role and her contemporaries’ judgment of her performance. A number of considerations urge this approach. During her life and after her death, Fuller was for people who knew her an unsolved riddle, inspiring and alienating. She remained a thorn in the side of the American imagination—one focus, for example, of Hawthorne’s ambivalence to women and a major source for both the girl idealists and the female cranks of the early James. The complex and powerful effect Fuller had on thinking men and women is probably more revealing of American attitudes than the effect of any other woman in her century, and it cannot be deduced from her writings alone. Studying her effect also helps us understand Fuller’s circumstances, feel the range of social values and pressures which Fuller sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected. By seeing with what difficulty privileged and gifted Americans in one of this country’s most fertile and innovative periods greeted the violations of convention by a woman, we understand better how difficult it was to be Margaret Fuller. Finally, this juxtaposition of her work with materials on the effect she generated gives us a richer sense of what she was like than her works alone provide. Virtually all her contemporaries assert that she was in her living presence greatly more impressive and influential than in her writing. Her enduring effect, I believe, came from the combination of her living presence and her work, and the form of this anthology is designed to capture, as much as possible, that combination.
The introductions to each part are intended to flesh out the biographical background and to help the modern reader interpret both Fuller and her contemporaries. Given the distorting intensity of the response to Fuller, the unusually poor condition of her papers, and the ambiguity of much of her writing, all interpretations must be partly speculative. Most of the materials about her were written, quite naturally, after her death. But because that death was so shockingly dramatic and because it followed on a chapter of Fuller’s life that was tragically heroic (in her risk of life for the people of Rome) and reeking of ill-concealed scandal (in her risk of reputation for love), her friends were confronted with a writing problem of no small dimension. In their exaltation of Fuller we sometimes feel the strain of their efforts to cover their guilt for the resentment they felt when she was with them. But the resentment they felt for the vividness of her freedom after she left America took the different form of a massive conspiracy to suppress what still menaced them. Her family appears to have concentrated on preventing publication of the love letters she wrote to James Nathan in New York (II :32, II:33).6 They also censored what was entrusted to the editors of the two-volume Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), a work which blended her informal writings with the recollections of her friends. In this labor of love and gratitude the editors, James Freeman Clarke, Emerson, and W. H. Channing, came to praise but also, perhaps unconsciously, to bury her. For however rebellious they had been as clergymen, the duty of protecting a lady’s reputation revitalized all their orthodoxy. Tacitly assuming that they should be the last to take interest in her papers, they freely applied pen and even scissors in preparing them for the printer. Whole letters and journal entries were “copied” and in most cases the originals destroyed. But enough scraps in her hand survive to give us some idea of the nature of the damage done. Sometimes her wordiness is abridged, but as often the vitality is converted into sonorous periods more appropriate to the pulpit. Channing, who prepared the section on the last phase of her life, was probably the worst offender: as Emerson shrewdly predicted, Channing was perhaps “too much her friend to leave him quite free enough.”7 In his hands, Fuller’s adjective in “It will be terrible for me to leave Italy” becomes “sad,” and “I . . . am happy, yes I am happy here” becomes the sedate “I am contented.” He and his associates deleted the name of Jesus Christ (or diluted it to “a saint”) when Fuller used it without due reverence, and supplied “O Father” when her awe was judged too freewheeling or pagan by the editors. In strikingly parallel fashion, the word “husband” is provided when Ossoli is named—and often when he is not but should have been lest Fuller seem to have thought too autonomously. (For instance, in publishing Emelyn Story’s account of Fuller’s confession at the time she feared she might not survive the siege of Rome, Channing added the words here placed in brackets: “Then she told me [of her marriage;] where her child was . . . and, in the event of her and her husband’s] death, I was to take the boy to her mother . . .”8 With a gallantry that may break records in the history of scholarship, these gentlemen quelled their doubts (but forgot to destroy all the records of them) to announce to the world that Fuller was safely married before she conceived her child.
Consequently, I have used the Memoirs only when other resources failed. The Memoirs is especially useful for interpretations of Fuller, for the editors solicited diverse opm10ns; but they were deficient in enlisting the recollections of many women Fuller influenced. As women’s writings were much less frequently published or preserved than men’s, these materials have proved more difficult to find. Moreover, the solicited reminiscences of the Brownings and Mazzini were mysteriously lost; and, either indifferent or fearful of what they might learn, the editors apparently did not seek accounts of Fuller from Adam Mickiewicz, Costanza Arconati, or many other close European friends.
As for Fuller’s writings, whenever I have found an original manuscript that differs from the record in the Memoirs, I have used the original.
Finally, it is appropriate to remark on the quality of Fuller’s writing. While it can be argued that certain social prejudices blocked her contemporaries from perceiving some of its virtues, still many modern readers have difficulty with it. At the worst, they find the style overblown, the form rambling and repetitious, the tone self-indulgent or arrogant, and the whole effect unremittingly intense. Although such difficulties cannot be explained away, it is important to try to understand them. An occasionally purple style and a form that follows where whimsical thought may lead characterize much of the writing of an age which placed a premium on spontaneity and feeling. In Fuller’s case, her need to feel (and/or convince others) that she was a woman while engaging in the intellectual pursuits of men may unconsciously have dictated a vehement and impulsive style rather than one more logical, cool, spare, and cerebral. The same instinct may have fed her tendency to digression; we often feel the insistent personal presence of the woman in these intimate asides. In a defense of the excesses of her life style, Fuller herself implies a related explanation of her writing style: “In an environment like mine, what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely needed to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction.”9 Her argument is that a woman seeking free action in nineteenth-century America must overdo to do at all. Applied to her writing, it may be her best defense. The rhetorical extravagance of the sentence quoted diminishes in proportion to the credence we lend to her thought. She appears to have similarly associated the strictures of literary forms with the confining social forms and to have resented what both cost her in vitality. She wrote that no old form suited her, and in writing as in life experimented and invented. Fuller was anything but vain about her writing, and her own dissatisfaction or modesty about it was so explicit and so often excessive that she herself has contributed to the low esteem in which it has been held.
Though Fuller’s writing has passages of great force and beauty, my chief interest is in what it reveals of her remarkable development. In her stylistic excesses one can read the struggle she had to create the appropriate tone, or rather to generate an authentic self who could command an attentive audience. Until experience completed that self, she was obliged to try on, like many costumes, the rhetorics to which she had access. Only after much thought, and with some trepidation, I have omitted passages where digression or repetition seemed not essential to her meaning. And it has been gratifying and deeply supportive to my central understanding of Fuller to discover that the problems in her style and tone diminished as she made her progress out of New England to the self-realization of exile.
My initial study of Fuller was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I began by looking at Fuller as one of the underground figures in American letters, hoping I would be able to invite her—like John Brown, the fugitive slave writers, and the literary mill girls—into the same classroom with Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and Hawthorne to see how these giants might fare in her company. I found in Fuller much more than I had bargained for—a woman who can speak to us still on the problems of reconciling productive independence with emotional needs, desire for singular achievement with sisterhood, feminism with other social issues, the strain of struggle with the desire for peace and acceptance, and intellectual idealism with an imperative need to act on material reality. When, in addition to all this, I saw how persistently her writing has been distorted and her real seriousness rendered sentimental or quaint, my interest in Fuller became all-consuming.
In preparing this book I have been richly helped by friends. Two who became friends in the course of the work are David Edgell, who made me fight for my view of Transcendentalism, and Liana Borghi, a Fuller scholar herself, whose help with Italian history, translation, and research (especially on the vexed question of Fuller’s marriage) was invaluable. Faith Williams gave me special help with Emerson, Barbara Welter with women’s history, Rik Booraem with American history, and Geoffrey Field and Norman Rush with European history. Lewis Cole, Helene Moglen, Al Fried, and Howard Waskow made useful suggestions on parts of the manuscript, and Myra Jehlen, Sara Blackburn, Danny Kaiser, and Paul Chevigny offered thoughtful and stimulating criticism of the whole. The librarians both at Sarah Lawrence College and at Purchase (especially Paula Hane) provided generous assistance, and Isabel Murray, great good humor in typing the manuscript. Nancy Woolcott offered research assistance, and Robyn Levine, Eileen Redmond, and Tim Hill acted as my first undergraduate critics. Ann Congleton provided emergency research aid and, with Frank Hutchins, extraordinary hospitality in Boston. Joel Myerson helped me date a Tribune article. Sue Davidson, Florence Howe, and Paul Lauter were helpful and encouraging editors. None of this work would have been possible without the help at home of Virginia Gale, Claire Chevigny, Rever Williams, and Maura Hammer, the patience and imagination of my young daughters, and the support of my husband (who can now again play records at night).
Fuller’s manuscripts are here published by courtesy of Willard P. Fuller, family custodian of Margaret Fuller’s literary estate, the Trustees of the Boston Public Library, and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. The Tappan, Clarke, and Samuel Gray Ward papers are here used by permission of the Houghton Library. For permission to use materials by Emerson, I am grateful to Columbia University Press, the Houghton Library, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association. The excerpt from Hawthorne’s American Notebooks appears by courtesy of the Ohio State University Press.
Notes
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