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
PART V
The Social Critic and Journalist
The long detour of Margaret Fuller’s career before the period of social and political activity raises questions about the influence of her father’s public life. The numerous letters she wrote her father during his terms in the House of Representatives (1817-25) are too self-conscious to yield more than the most tentative clues. By turns gossipy, erudite, and sentimental, they refer seldom to public life, and her request that he send newspapers to her at Miss Prescott’s school comes as a surprise. More characteristically, her references to his work suggest a precocious amusement and detachment. When only ten, she asked him to send her the speeches of Mr. Randolph (probably John Randolph of Roanoke), which she judged “Keen, witty (though satirical), and eloquent,” adding, “I never troubled my head much about any of the speeches except yours unless to laugh at the endless repetition observable in some.” Again, in 1825, she teased him about asserting so positively in one season that Adams will prevail and wavering in the next.1
It was not until the mid-1830s that Fuller developed a solid respect for political activity. At that time, Timothy Fuller, preparing a history of his country and perhaps seeking to renew on a healthier footing his old closeness to his daughter, drew her into the study of American history and Jefferson’s letters. “A genuine man,” as she saw him, Jefferson persuaded her that a citizen “need not stoop to be a demagogue, he need not swagger his Demosthenian thunders on every petty local question, he need not despise, nay he ought not to disregard general literature, nor elegant pursuits.”2 Jefferson led her thus to distinguish a political activity which is consistent with culture and dignity from “the paltry game of local politics” which she had always despised and continued to scorn the rest of her life. Jefferson also voiced the belief in America’s special democratic destiny that later informed Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century and her Tribune writing. Most important, this study gave her the exciting sensation, perhaps for the first time, of usefully belonging to her “time and place” (V:5). But the promise hinted here of a social and political vocation was so effectively canceled after her father’s death in 1835 that in July 1842 she responded to the Dorr rebellion in the streets of Providence more like a Federalist than a daughter of a “Jacobin.” Unequivocally rejecting her time and place, she wrote that she never felt a greater “aversion to my environment,” and prayed to the “Eternal” for a heart purged from “this hot haste about ephemeral trifles” (V:6).
As we shall see, this prim repudiation of contemporary political action in 1842 began as early as the next year to give way; by gradual stages, corresponding to her various removes from New England—to the West, to New York, and to Europe—it was transformed into interest, then enthusiasm, and finally active engagement. Fuller’s conservative period coincides with the high tide of her friendship with Emerson, with the years in which she found his anti-historical bias most attractive. Conservatism for both was a matter of taste, a function of skeptical temperament. But their shared skepticism about the systems of other men drove them in different directions. Emerson’s skepticism threw him back, especially in his public persona, on the unbroken unity between the self-reliant self and the perfected idea of America, while Fuller’s made her doubt systems even of her own making and finally forced her outward to observe with sharpening curiosity the actual conditions of Americans and to collect what nuggets of meaning she could derive from them. But this evolution was slow and nowhere in sight when, in the last months of 1840, she refused to join in George Ripley’s communal society and even to discuss abolition in her Conversations. Since she later became a warm advocate of Utopian socialism and abolition this early resistance bears examination.
Different as Brook Farm was from Emerson’s “crystal cell,” it too began with a door slammed on the church. Convinced that the Christian life could not flourish under existing social conditions, George Ripley resigned his ministry in the effort to create an exemplary society in small. More dedicated than worldly-wise, he chose as the site of the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education 170 acres in West Roxbury, most of them gravel. Established as a joint-stock company, it was designed “to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual” and to gather people together as equals who would run, according to their several tastes and talents, a farm and school freed of “the pressure of our competitive institutions.” Implicitly, it was expected to disclose a new social order. Experimental Utopias, though mostly conceived in Europe, were spawned furiously in America, the land that James Madison told Harriet Martineau was “useful in proving things before held impossible.” By benefiting and uniting people of all classes, the communitarian socialism of Robert Owen or Charles Fourier was deliberately shaped to minimize class struggle and to preclude revolution. Although George and Sophia Ripley had read Fourier and, as we shall see, in 1844 converted Brook Farm into a Fourierist “phalanx,” they began in 1840 with native Transcendental spontaneity.3
Nevertheless the Ripleys early efforts to enlist Alcott, Emerson, and Fuller all failed. Alcott would soon shape his own utopia; Emerson declined to move from his “present prison to a prison a little larger.” Fuller’s refusal was more complex. Her resentful years in Groton had robbed farm life of glamour, and her bitter memory of her father’s strict regimen made her resist forced social planning. Emerson’s influence too speaks in her caveat “We are not ripe to reconstruct society yet,” and in the unconscious vanity of her assertion that she is “so unrelated” to society that the corruption of her times has left no mark on her. Craving an association based on “destinies,” not “efforts,” she noted in her journal that she belonged “to a constellation, not a phalanx,” and judged far nobler the “man entirely unpledged, unbound” than one committed to any doctrine.4 All this was bravado, not boldness. Nevertheless, Fuller enjoyed the ferment Brook Farm produced and frequently visited there, offering Conversations and listening to confidences, and walking in the pinewoods. As she came to know the place, she tentatively endorsed the communal principle while sustaining her objection to the haste and blind optimism of its execution.
In 1844, the Ripleys, influenced by Albert Brisbane, the chief American disciple of Fourier, remodeled the Farm as closely as they could after Fourier’s phalanx. Fourier was the first writer of the period to base a critique of bourgeois society squarely on a materialist reading of human nature. Civilization, he argued, had failed because it had suppressed passions inseparable from the human condition. He proposed, by accepting and utilizing the passions, to create small exemplary communities, or phalanxes, in which labor would be freed from coercion, and sexuality no longer repressed. Funded by private capital, the phalanx would share profits according to a reshuffled hierarchy of labor, capital, and talent. What was penetrating and advanced in Fourier’s thought was offset by wild prophetic fantasies and an obsession with mathematics which led him to insist on precise proportions for the buildings in the community. Brisbane was a reformer enamoured of technology, a man in whom mathematics and compassion seemed to nourish each other, yet for his American readers he was shrewd enough to edit out the master’s madness and his modern sexual thought. Omitting Fourier’s millennial seas of lemonade and playing down the radical-feminist and free-love implications of his sanction of “passional attraction,” Brisbane stressed the validity of “attractive industry”—the pursuit of a variety of preferences in labor—and of divided wealth. Notwithstanding these sober adjustments, many in the Transcendental community fell away in horror from the mechanical organization of labor by “Groups and Series.” Fuller continued to visit, doubtful but curious, missing “leisure and liberality” but finding, despite “a good deal of sound to the machinery,” that “the wheels seemed to turn easily.”5 After she left Massachusetts, as we shall see, the seriousness of Fourier’s grasp of social oppression held increasing interest for her.
In a similar way, her early response to the abolitionists was marked by a defensive individualism. Nowhere did the Transcendentalists of Emerson’s persuasion so clearly subscribe to a class consciousness—even while denying they were a class—as in their response in the 1830s and 1840s to the abolitionists. For the fiercest and most organized opposition to the abolitionists came from “gentlemen of property and standing.” Pressure groups, which included what they called “despicable outcasts,” threatened the authority of local elites, and the abolitionists’ direct appeal to women and children was seen as an incursion on patriarchal authority.6 Although the Transcendentalists did not share these fears and opposed slavery in principle, they felt the abolitionists’ concerns were necessarily external and vulgarly sectarian: their audience was the faceless crowd and their language had to be shrill enough to be heard. The style of the abolitionists, their heat and vehemence, combined with their threat to individualism, nearly distracted Fuller for years from the content of their exhortations. In this period, she praised the elder Channing for “standing apart from the conflicts of the herd” in his book Slavery (1836): “So refreshing its calm, benign atmosphere, after the pestilence-bringing gales of the day.” Invective and strained rhetoric immediately deafened her, and she criticized the polemical tone of Theodore Parker and her friend W. H. Channing: “Truth needs no such weapons.”7 But her neglect of abolition in the Boston Conversations contrasts with her awakened interest in Woman in the Nineteenth Century and her New York Tribune contributions. Going west with Sarah and James Clarke in the summer of 1843 helped to change her attitudes.
Of course, Fuller did not see slaves on that trip but rather the new settlers and the Indian tribes those settlers were driving out. In the narrative made from her journals, Summer on the Lakes, her steadily growing appreciation for both groups began to break the spell of New England elitism. In her writing about the Indians, it is often hard to separate the fresh insight from the platitude, her self-examination from her complacency. As the book opens, the “quiet satisfaction” she felt at seeing that Niagara matched its description gave way, when she let her own response emerge, to an “undefined dread” and the irrepressible fantasy of an Indian ambush (V:10). Her candor here about her conditioned fear may have helped her later, when she encountered actual Indians, to write about them with vividness and sensitivity. She perpetually identifies them with the gorgeous and immense landscape of the West. Indians and land become, as they would for Thoreau, measures for the white man, for his use of the earth and its creatures, for his honesty, magnaminity, and reverence.8 But romanticizing the Indian past was hardly novel; it linked her to the Whig critics of Jackson’s ruthless Indian policy. Then too, her preoccupation with the degradation of the contemporary Indian may have sprung either from a kindred sense of oppression or from its opposite, an inability to break through their discomforting otherness. Whatever its source, her shame and indignation at the crimes of her own race were genuine and made her keen to find in books on Indians and in the whites she met the psychohistory of racism, the inevitable “aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded.” We may be amused by her presumption in writing, after staying alone several days near the Indian encampment of Mackinaw Island, “I feel acquainted with the soul of this race,” but her sympathetic exposure to the Indians may have fed her later interest in blacks.
As the frontier exposed the democratic experiment at its baldest extreme, Fuller looked to the white settlements for a “new order.” She saw the relative disconnectedness of the white settler from the wilderness first in his complacent instinct to spit into Niagara Falls and ludicrously to offer himself there as a guide. (This Fuller compared to asking for an usher to point out the moon.) In Chicago she saw only negatives: “I like not the petty intellectualities, cant, and bloodless theory there at home, but this merely instinctive existence, to those who live it so ‘first rate,’ ‘off hand’ and ‘go ahead,’ pleases me no better.” The dreary alternative appeared to be importation of Yankee narrowness and calculation in the men or of European standards of culture in the unhappy women, who usually had been dragged unwillingly and unprepared into the West. But people like William Clarke, James’ brother, who took her on a wagon tour of northern Illinois, began to feed her hope for a new culture; she was enchanted by William’s tales and “unstudied lore, the unwritten poetry which common life presents to a strong and gentle mind. It was a great contrast to the subtleties of analysis, the philosophical strainings of which I had seen so much.” By the end of this voyage in which she had made her bed on a bar-room floor and shot the rapids with aplomb in an Indian canoe, she called it “pleasant” to hear “rough men tell pieces out of their own common lives, in place of the frippery talk of some fine circle with its conventional sentiment, and timid, second-hand criticism” (Writing later on travel books by women, she noted that journeying stretched the authors’ minds.)9 Such experiences educated her tastes and perceptions and, perhaps, prepared her for the diversity of New York.
The challenge of adapting to the frontier coupled with the difficulty of talking her way into the exclusively male preserves of the Harvard Library to complete research for her book must have eased her transition to demotic New York as the first female member of the working press. In 1844, Harlem was farmland and Central Park pasture for goats and turf for squatters, but to the south, muddy and reeking streets notwithstanding, the city seethed with life and Greeley’s New York Tribune on Nassau Street missed little of it. The Tribune began publication in 1841 as a paper dedicated first to the elevation of the masses—the reading public generated by the new penny papers—and second to the success of the liberal Whigs. Greeley hoped to crowd out the sensational rival penny papers by his commitment to morality, social progress, and the arts.
The Tribune reflected what mattered to Greeley, the pride and excitement in the city that had dazzled the farm boy and the indignation over social injustice that staggered him when he saw the victims of the panic of 1837 and that made him for a while an ardent Fourierist. Greeley was no radical: he sympathized with woman’s claim for justice but rejected divorce reform and suffrage; he opposed through legal forms the extension of slaveholding territory but attacked abolitionists for divisiveness; and he was appalled by working conditions but fought labor unionism and strikes. Yet he was compassionate and open-minded and, as an editor, progressive or outspoken enough to be often embattled in his attacks on the Mexican War or nativism and his support of the Irish or Fourier. An associate recalled that Greeley was never so happy as when at bay, and he was never more attacked and warlike than in the nearly two years when Fuller worked with him.10 This was the man and the journal that could help her pick up the thread dropped ten years before, root her again in her time and place, and set her in action.
“Mr. Greeley I like, nay more, love. He is, in his habits, a—plebian; in his heart, a noble man. His abilities, in his own way, are great. He believes in mine to a surprising extent. We are true friends,” she wrote to her brother Eugene. Glossing over the bumpy beginning of their relationship, this description was accurate. They were both perhaps more useful friends to each other than to Mary Greeley, who paid back Horace for his single-minded attention to his paper with her whimsically tyrannical mothering of their son “Pickie,” whom all three adored. Until she moved into town, Fuller made their home less the “Castle Doleful” Greeley later called it, drawing callers for Mary and becoming deeply attached to Pickie. Horace, whom she found as “disinterestedly generous” as her mother, was the first in a long while who could “teach” her many things.11
“I like living here,” she wrote Sarah Shaw, “All flows freely and I find I don’t dislike wickedness and wretchedness more than pettiness and coldness. My own individual life is easy to lead.” It was not her uncomplicated love for Horace Greeley that made possible these remarkable claims, and certainly not her contorted and wasted passion for the deft social climber James Nathan. More than the various stimulation they provided, it was the city, the bracing concreteness of its problems, her own growing mastery and complete freedom of action, her vast audience and their responsiveness, that gave her that exhilarating sense of mobility and engagement. All this made her relish “this great field which opens before me,” and exult that she had “never been so well situated.”12
Margaret Fuller’s New York was literary soirees or meetings with old Isaac Hopper, the intrepid Underground Railroad engineer and last Quaker in knee breeches, who was now planning the first halfway house for female convicts. (Hopper Home still functions on the Lower East Side, not far from its original site on Twelfth Street.) It was trysts with Nathan at Lydia Maria Child’s house or at the office of Dr. Leger, the magnetic healer who reportedly cured her spinal curvature.13 It was tours of galleries and studios, or (with W. H. Channing, then a city missionary) of schools, hospitals, asylums, prisons, or that sink of poverty and crime, the Five Points area. It was concerts, or the Tabernacle lecture of Cassius M. Clay, the charismatic antislavery publisher whose press had been destroyed in Kentucky. New York was the refuge of Danish adventurer, Harro Harring, who brought news of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and revolution in Europe, whose novel Fuller impetuously helped finance from her slender reserves. It was also the refuge of thousands of Irish whose mass flight from the potato famine made them a social problem in their new home, and it was the great harbor embraced by the “wood of masts” that she found better than any poem. Standing in the city, Fuller felt “the life blood rushing from an entire continent to swell her heart.”14
Fuller’s life was integral to her work, and most of it went into her writing. Greeley had hired her to fill the spot vacated by Albert Brisbane (later filled by George Ripley) and he expected her to report on social conditions as well as lend literary prestige to the paper. Book reviews often became occasions for her social commentary, and in the nearly two hundred articles she wrote in New York, she supported all his major causes as well as generating some of her own. The ignorance and deviousness attributed to the Irish she analyzed as “the faults of an oppressed race” (V:16), and she welcomed the persecuted Jews and Germans. She inveighed against the war in Mexico, Southern slavery, and Northern prejudice, and she defended even the rhetoric of Cassius Clay, called fanatical by his enemies. She mocked the cowardice of publishers, when one house broke a contract with Harring because his book was “not duly orthodox.”15 She demanded more enlightened education and broader employment for the poor and for women. She played on the guilt of the rich to win support for charitable institutions, and she urged them to supply both companionship and furniture for Hopper Home.
No longer preoccupied with ideal friendship or restricted to acquaintance in her class, Fuller’s concern for women in trouble could flourish, and her feminism grew with her social awareness. According to Dall, Nathan had heard of her interest in “abandoned women” and first approached her for advice about a young woman he had seduced in Germany who had followed him to America. Fuller not only talked with the woman and “saved her from further profanation,” but provided “safety and a home” to others in similar difficulties.16 Though Fuller’s advocacy in her articles about women prisoners has more than a touch of noblesse oblige, in the context of prevailing convictions, her approach was advanced. Penologists then held that “if a girl had natural warmth and passion, even a single sexual experience made her capable of any crime.” And Tocqueville, visiting prisons in America, was told by a corrections officer that “the reformation of girls, who have contracted bad morals, is a chimera which it is hopeless to pursue.”17 In this atmosphere, Fuller’s support of Eliza Farnham’s controversial rehabilitation program at Sing Sing was imaginative and bold. Her energetic commitment to these women was simply the practical application of her theory of evil reasserted in her attack in the Tribune, March 4, 1846, on capital punishment; she argued that the Creative spirit “has permitted the temporary existence of evil as a condition necessary to bring out [in persons] free agency and individuality of character.” Moreover, her involvement was backed by respect. As she wrote to Nathan, after visiting the women at Hopper Home, “I like them better than most women I meet, because, if any good is left, it is so genuine, and they make no false pretensions nor cling to shadows.”18
As her job as a reporter gave her access to worlds hitherto closed to a woman of her class, a deepening concern for other oppressed groups—immigrants, blacks, the poor, the blind, the insane—followed. The modern reader may feel in this concern the same ambivalence as in her attitude to the Indians. Liberal as her reportage was for the time, it was still eminently genteel muckraking: the Jew is subjected to age-old stereotyping, the poor to kindly pity. Her inexperience with social issues coupled with that unquestioned confidence in the authority of her own feelings made her naive or condescending in these pieces as often she was moving and advanced. They should be read as apprentice exercises through which she groped her way toward her more informed, critical, and independent role of foreign correspondent.
The failure of many of her old friends to approve her new career forced her to understand how she had changed. “They think I ought to produce something excellent, while I am satisfied to aid in the great work of popular education,” she confided to a friend. “I never regarded literature merely as a collection of exquisite products, but rather as a means of mutual interpretation. Feeling that many are reached and in some degree helped, the thoughts of every day seem worth noting, though in a form that does not inspire me.” She no longer needed that old intoxication, much of it self-induced, of reaching for a unique, unprecedented form of expression. The pursuit of writing as “mutual interpretation,” as a process in which the writer, impatient with static products, joins with forces for social change, was demanding enough. While with The Dial she aimed not “at leading public opinion, but at stimulating each man to think for himself,”19 the stimulus of a mass audience and her goal of popular education began to reverse these objectives. Then the urgency of social issues all around her and the discipline of Greeley’s deadlines effectively destroyed her desire with The Dial to have “the will palsied like Hamlet by a deep-searching tendency.”
But when it came to solutions for social ills, Fuller had difficulty in taking a new direction. For specific institutions she could outline pragmatic reforms, but deep-seated social problems aroused only lofty hopes for a wise national policy. Though in her editorial pieces she liked to conjure up the image of purifying fire, it remained spiritual metaphor as long as she was in America. Though she claimed, on January 17, 1846, that “we ourselves belong to the ‘extreme left’ of the Army of Progress,” she declined to act in a “spirit of defiance and haste.” Instead, she depended on the twin bastions which were her Jeffersonian and Transcendentalist heritage: her confidence in the high moral destiny of America and her faith in the self-determining powers of the individual. In Woman she had written, “This country is as surely destined to elucidate a great moral law, as Europe was to promote the mental culture of Man,” (IV:13), and at the beginning of her Tribune career, she was sanguine about America fulfilling Heaven’s “great promise.” But a year later, after the annexation of Texas and on the eve of war with Mexico, the promise had become ambiguous: the national eagle still “will lead the van” in the coming time “but whether to soar upward to the sun or to stoop for helpless prey, who now dares promise?” After the first victory of the war, she wrote contemptuously, “our stars have lighted us only to the ancient heathen—the vulgar path of national aggrandizement.” And in her last month in New York, “Our hopes as to National honor and goodness are almost wearied out, and we feel obliged to turn to the Individual and to the Future for consolation.”20
This second recourse—her faith in the potency of the individual leader, in the leaven that would lift up the masses, as she liked to put it—seemed at first more sound. “If nations go astray, the narrow path may always be found and followed by the individual man,” she wrote on July 4, 1845, adding further, “Let men feel that in private lives, more than in public measures, must the salvation of the country lie.”21 But for the January 1, 1846, Tribune, she gloomily remarked that there was “no great genius at this day living,” and her national commentary remained dispirited from then until she left the country.
Not only had the great leaders dropped from view, but the doctrine of self-determination also seemed increasingly irrelevant, as she fixed her attention on those who through poverty, degradation, or ignorance were denied the wherewithal of self-determination. As with her response to the prisoners, education and moral enlightenment came first to the mind of this woman who owed so much to self-culture, but in New York the proportions of the task seemed massive. She never offered a threat to established power, but at moments she began to glimpse that other institutions had to be transformed before the oppressed could really learn, and that the privileged, for all their education, were necessarily oppressors. Confident only that the solutions could not emerge from any political party, she glanced, rather fleetingly to be sure, at the creation of new institutions, the promise of leadership from the people, and the dream of a classless society.22
In this connection, one of the most tantalizing suggestions in the Tribune archives is Fuller’s translation, published August 5, 1845, of a letter from the Paris correspondent of the Deutsche Schnellpost, a German-immigrants’ newspaper. Among her regular contributions to the Tribune were reviews of European journals and a survey of news from abroad, often light or bizarre. But this article, occupying half of the Tribune’s front page, drew on the rich recent political experience of Europe and argued, as Fuller had done and would continue to do, that political progress does not necessarily bring social progress in its wake. According to this analyst, probably Heinrich Börnstein, the requisite “wider principles” would be found neither in abstract humanism nor “too sensual” communism, but in the socialism where both converged. Moreover, this socialist school was no party but a loosely associated group of laborers and hounded philosophers like Marx or Ruge. The author then deplores Marx’s criticism of Bauer in the Holy Family (just published that year) and Ruge’s of Marx, though he is confident too that truth arises from such contacts, and he closes with a long quotation from Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England. This is surely among the very earliest notices of Marx and Engels in America. More remarkable is the closeness between Fuller’s ideas at this point and Bornstein’s. It is interesting to speculate about what might have happened had communication opened between the two journalists, and had Fuller followed the thought of Marx and Engels in the next three years. In the Communist Manifesto she might have approached answers to questions that were to become increasingly pressing for her when, in Europe, no patriotic idealism veiled reality, and she confronted class division in all its nakedness.
In August 1846, she sailed for England as one of the first American correspondents of either sex and as companion to the philanthropic Marcus Spring, his wife, Rebecca, and young son, Eddie. In asking Sam Ward for a loan of five hundred dollars, she regretted briefly that she had not seen Europe with him ten years before: “It would have given my genius wings” and compensated for “my painful youth.” But disappointment had brought her into “liberal communion with the woful [sic] struggling crowd of fellowmen.” In a rare lapse of prophetic powers, she wrote that now her mind and character were “too much formed” to be much changed by Europe; instead it would offer her a “new field of observation” for her career as journalist.24
In Great Britain, exploration of social conditions and new tendencies crowded out most of the time she would earlier have spent with culture and “genius.” Thus she had only one day for the British Museum and omitted visiting most of the private galleries. The memory of Burns’ rebuke to the aristocracy earns more space in her writing than her visit to once-cherished Wordsworth. She regretted that Wordsworth’s “habits of seclusion” deafened him “to the voice which cries loudly from other parts of England, and will not be stilled by sweet poetic suasion or philosophy, for it is the cry of men in the jaws of destruction.” (These words contrast sharply with her earlier praise for the sweet detachment of Channing’s anti-slavery book.) She listened with interest to British reformers, though she did not fail to reproach them for their wars with China and Ireland. Style was still a consideration with her, and George Dawson, James Martineau, and W. J. Fox could not match Channing’s eloquence or Parker’s “sustained flow,” but she cared more now about the “homely adaptation of their thought to common wants.” She wrote enthusiastically about improvement of tenements, the public baths of Edinburgh and public laundries of London, and the Mechanics Institute of Liverpool whose director quoted The Dial in urging self-reliance on his students. Everywhere she noted the energetic versatility of British women: working in publishing and art, stocking the provincial museums, and creating new educational institutions for working people.25
Galvanizing her intensified attention to reform was the vivid and omnipresent shock of poverty in England. Dogging her progress through all the celebrated cities was the unforgettable sight of the industrial slums, especially their worn female victims “too dull to carouse” and their children fed on opium. “Poverty in England has terrors of which I never dreamed at home,” she wrote; yet we know she had toured the slums of Five Points with Channing. What her unconscious adherence to the democratic rhetoric of America made her miss at home the European tradition of critical political rhetoric laid bare in England.
While England made her urge intelligent men of means to take steps before it was too late, the more volatile and precarious state of affairs in France pointed to more drastic and wholesale change. In 1847, the rapid growth of two different tendencies was preparing the explosion that in the next year would blast Louis Philippe off the throne. The bourgeois liberals and educated industrial workers, who wanted the political freedoms won in the French Revolution complemented socially by the means to exercise and enjoy it, represented one tendency. The theoreticians who analyzed the ills of capitalism and built alternative socialist Utopias—the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists—led the other.27 Fuller met Victor-Prosper Considérant, Fourier’s chief disciple,28 and very likely met Pierre Leroux, who had broken from Saint-Simon to build a system of his own; both men were active in the revolutionary government the next year. (Leroux had founded La Revue Indépendente, the journal which published a translation of Fuller’s essay on American literature and invited her to write more pieces.) Everywhere she saw signs of frustration and ferment: Paris workers attending night school, and Lyons weavers too oppressed to do so. She met Pierre-Jean de Béranger, jailed for satirical songs which kept alive the spirit of the Revolution, and she read incendiary leaflets in the street. As in England, her dispatches gave more space to social concerns—prostitution, a school for the mentally retarded, the new creches (or day-care centers)—than to cultural ones. She made time, however, to pay homage to the manuscripts of Rousseau, “the precursor of all we most prize,” whose “spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human nature and fraught with prophecy.”29
Fuller’s swift public tour was paralleled by a rushing private voyage. As Europe heated up for revolution, Fuller’s experiences and encounters were preparing her for fundamental and irrevocable change in her personal life. If she had come to Europe still hoping to join the expedient Nathan, that hope was effectively killed when she received a letter in Edinburgh announcing his engagement to a German woman. Shortly afterward, descending Ben Lomond after a four-mile climb, she was separated from Marcus Spring, failed to find the path, and was forced to spend a dangerous night alone on a narrow ledge, keeping in constant motion to survive the cold mist that mounted in visionary shapes. She resisted the lures of fatal passivity and was found in the morning by a rescue party of shepherds. Her “mental experience,” she wrote in her dispatch, was “most precious and profound,” a “presentation of stern, serene realities,” and apparently it was also cathartic.30 She not only relinquished pursuit of Nathan, but also effectively quit all longing for misty embraces, whether of man or idea.
At the same time, Europeans who had admired her Woman and her newly issued Papers on Literature and Art were giving her a handsome reception, and made her feel life rich with tangible possibilities. “As soon as I reached England,” she confided to Caroline Sturgis, “I found how right we were in supposing there was elsewhere a greater range of interesting character among the men, than with us.” To Richard she amplified, “from their habits of conversation so superior to those of Americans, I am able to come out a great deal more than I can at home, and they seem proportionately interested.” But her pleasure sprang less from the men than from herself. “I find myself in my element in European society,” she wrote Emerson. “It does not, indeed, come up to my ideal, but so many of the encumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in water.”31 It did not come up to her ideal, but made her freer: she all but confesses that idealism confined her. Even before she reached Italy, which would move her from active liberalism to radicalism, Europe was offering her two crucial sensations America never did: the shock of class consciousness and the warm bath of personal (and implicitly physical) self-acceptance. Tocqueville’s knot was coming undone. She was more than ready for the liberating influence of Mazzini in London and of Mickiewicz and Sand in Paris, who would help her discover how to move against the two pressures, social and religious, that bound American women in place.
She met Giuseppe Mazzini in her last month in England. Driven by political urgency nearly twenty years earlier to abandon his literary aspirations, Mazzini was well suited to help her channel the powerful indignation the tour of Great Britain had stirred. (Mazzini’s premise that you cannot transform the inward man if he works fourteen hours a day32 now made more sense than Emerson’s doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man.”) Barred from Italy fifteen years before, Mazzini had tirelessly pursued his vision of a united and Republican Europe to be initiated by a Republican Italy centered in Rome, to be informed by a new religious synthesis, “the religion of Humanity,” and to move toward the eventual fusion of all classes into one. After the failure of uprisings in northern Italy, he had been working quietly in London raising money to revive his “Young Italy” abroad. Appealing to the sentimental pity of the British upper classes for Italian children exploited as organ-grinders and vendors of white mice, he had opened a free school for Italian workmen where he added a fourth R to the traditional three: revolution—thinly guised as history and geography. Harro Harring introduced Fuller to Mazzini, who knew her work through the Carlyles and invited her to speak at his school’s anniversary celebration. Despite the reservations about Christianity she and Mazzini shared, for the Tribune she compared the students to the disciples of Judaea and predicted that these poor Italian boys could be in these times more effective than an Orphic poet with their people. Her language is symptomatic of the effect this ascetic and charismatic figure—dressed perpetually in velvet mourning for Italy—had, especially on women with whom he felt a special affinity.
Mazzini’s real importance for Fuller lay in his incorporating many of the values she still cherished while helping her to abandon those beginning to fail her and endorse new ones she needed. He shared her conviction that self-education was our first duty, but he generalized it until it held the secret of immortality: “Humanity is like a man who lives indefinitely and is always learning,” he wrote. Like her, he located the destructive force in materialism, but he coupled it with the individualism Fuller had, until recently, cherished uncritically; thus he attacked America as “the negative, individualistic, materialistic school.” He pitted against such individualism the “collective thought,” the determination learned from the Saint-Simonians to subordinate the parts of society to the whole. Thus he brought a new selflessness to nationalism, which was for him the prelude to the “association” of all humanity. What put teeth in this roseate vision was his conviction that war, undertaken by the subject people without the intervention of foreign governments, was the sole recourse for Italy. While Fuller’s ideas remained more secular and less hopeful than Mazzini’s, the unshakable collectivity of his vision helped her to move intellectually past her floundering dependence on heroes and men of good will, and his calm acceptance of the need for armed struggle undermined her fading faith in reform; both developments were preconditions for her own radicalism. Recognizing Fuller’s value, Mazzini sent off letters of introduction to his mother and many allies on the continent, and Fuller felt committed enough to his plan to smuggle him disguised in her party into Italy. But she did not give herself over to hero worship. Even in her first account, while she called him “the most beauteous person I have seen,” she added subtly, “He is one in whom holiness has purified, but somewhat dwarfed the man.”33
By contrast, Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish poet, whom she met shortly before leaving Paris, was one in whom holiness must have seemed only to amplify the man. Mickiewicz shared with Mazzini a love of literature and the will to put it aside to struggle for freedom, a devotion to the land of his birth, a commitment to fight for its nationhood and republicanism throughout Europe. Their political differences lay primarily in Mickiewicz’s mystical authoritarianism—his subscription to Catholicism and his deference to the Pope and the Bonapartes. Of crucial importance to Fuller was the stress he laid on women’s rights. By way of introduction, she sent him a volume of the poems of Emerson, whom Mickiewicz much admired. It is noteworthy that rhe Emerson he had quoted frequently in support of his own inflammatory lectures at the College de France was sometimes distorted in the process. Though he cited Emerson on intuition, self-reliance, and organic connectedness, he went far beyond his source when he tied these values to a heroic agrarian folk that would redeem the world. And for all his apocalypticism, Mickiewicz needed time and space more than Emerson, who, he declared, “isolates us too much, not taking into account epoch, nation or earth. Emerson’s man dangles one knows not where.”34
Meeting Fuller was, for Mickiewicz, one of those experiences which “consoles and fortifies.” He found her a “true person,” the only “woman to whom it has been given to touch what is decisive in the present world and to have a presentiment of the world of the future.” But his first letter to her suggests he believed she needed still more rooting in the physical present: “For you the first step of your deliverance . . . is to know whether you are to be permitted to remain a virgin.” So ripe was Fuller for sexual “deliverance” that she apparently took no offense at his presumption. Moreover, she saw in Mickiewicz the longed-for synthesis: “I found in him the man I had long wished to see, with the intellect and passions in due proportion for a full and healthy human being, with a soul constantly inspiring,” she wrote Emerson.35
To Emerson’s neighbor, Elizabeth Hoar, Fuller described her equally powerful encounter with George Sand. In Sand, Fuller recognized her own androgynous ideal, the forehead and eyes “beautiful,” the lower part of the face “strong and masculine,” these elements fused by “the expression of goodness, wholeness, and power, that pervaded the whole,—the truly human heart and nature that shone in the eyes.” Enjoying “the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius,” she adds, “I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never liked a woman better.” Most striking is the change in Fuller’s response to Sand’s sexual habits. Though her boldness in defending Sand in her writing for America had shocked her readers, it was always qualified. “Those who would reform the world must show that they do not speak in the heat of wild impulse,” she had cautioned in Woman (IV:13), and in her Tribune review she cried, “Would, indeed, the surgeon had come with quite clean hands!”(III:16). Now, in the freer atmosphere of France, she writes without apology that Sand’s “range” was too great for any one man permanently to “interest and command her,” and sums up: “She needs no defence, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature, and always with good intentions” (V:23). Nearly three years later, Fuller was to write of her own passion, “for bad or for good, I acted out my character” (VI:48); the echo is strong proof of the sanction Sand’s extraordinary influence provided for the younger woman.
How often Fuller saw Sand we do not know, but she regretted she had not more time to give to “this real and important relation” with Mickiewicz. But the Springs’ itinerary was for Italy, and Fuller left Paris with mixed feelings. “It pains me to come away, having touched only the glass over the picture,” she wrote. But on the other hand, she had never been entirely comfortable with the “slippery” French: “My French teacher says, I speak and act like an Italian, and I hope, in Italy I shall find myself more at home.”36
Reluctant as she was to leave these extraordinary influences, Sand’s freedom and wholeness, Mickiewicz’ exhortations to free herself sexually, and Mazzini’s inspiration to devote herself actively combined to propel her toward the land and the city her earliest study had taught her to love. Rome would prove more a home than any she had known. Here historical events would combine with Fuller’s unleashed capacity for growth and change to offer her her most comprehensive definition of self, her most satisfying and radical work.
Notes
1. December 20, 1824; November 22, 1820; January 31, 1825, Houghton MS.
2. Houghton MS.
3. Arthur Eugene Bestor, Jr., Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1827 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), pp. 1-10.
4. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1910), V, 473: Memoirs, II, 57, 58-59, 73.
5. Georgiana Bruce Kirby, Years of Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887), p. 186.
6. Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolitionist Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 58-62.
7. Memoirs, I, 129-30; letter to Mary Rotch and Miss Gifford, February 5, 1843, Houghton MS. An earlier letter to James Clarke (II:11) hinted, however, that should action replace theory she would be ready for it.
8. Thoreau first urged her to make a book of her notes, and the digressive and subjective narrative structure very likely influenced his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; the use of the Indian as a measure appears, of course, in Walden.
9. Rusk, Letters, III, 200-201n.; Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844; rpt. Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1972), pp. 67, 249; Kindred Papers, p. 287.
10. James Parton, Life of Horace Greeley (New York: Mason Bros., 1953),
pp. 263-65. See also Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 19S3).
11. Higginson, 209; Memoirs, II, 51.
12. February 25, 1845, Jay Papers, Houghton; Higginson, p. 208.
13. Kirby, p. 213.
14. Tribune, September 8, 1845.
15. Tribune, September 8, 184S.
16. Copy of May 29, 1908, letter to Higginson, Houghton MS.
17. W. David Lewis, “The Female Criminal and the Prisons of New York, 1825-45,” New York History, 42 (1961), 217.
18. Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845-1846 (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), p. 114.
19. Memoirs, II, 164, BPL MS.
20. Tribune, January 1, 1845; January 1, 1846; May 21, 1846; July 8, 1846. See also Francis E. Kearns, “Margaret Fuller’s Social Criticism,” Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1960, Ch. IV.
21. See also January 1, 1845, where she asserts that “ten just men” can save the nation.
22. See especially “Prince’s Poems (August 13, 1845), “Thom’s Poems” (August 22, 1845), and “Mrs. Norton’s Child of the Islands” (July 26, 1845), reprinted together as “Poets of the People,” Papers on Literature, II, 1-21.
23. Heinrich Bornstein often wrote dispatches for the Schnellpost and was at that time proprietor, in Paris, of Vorwärts, a radical paper that published people named in the article—Weitling, Ruge, and Marx—and later started a paper in St. Louis with Bernays, also named here.
24. March 3, 1845, Samuel Gray Ward Papers, Houghton.
25. At Home and Abroad, pp. 132-33, 168, 174, 162, 127.
26. At Home and Abroad, p. 171.
27. Georges Duveau, 1848: The Making of a Revolution, trans. Anne Carter (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 209-12.
28. She wrote Channing that Considerant and his associates were “full of hope and their Propaganda has a real and increasing influence as is proved by the taunts which every other party has in store . . . . “ BPL MS.
29. At Home and Abroad, p. 207.
30. At Home and Abroad, p. 155.
31. Memoirs, II, 172; September 27, 1846, Houghton MS; Memoirs, II, 184.
32. Gwilym O. Griffith, Mazzini: Prophet of Modern Europe (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), p. 177.
33. Gaetano Savemini, Mazzini, trans. I.M. Rawson (New York: Crowell Collier, 1962), p. 57 Denis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 13; Memoirs, II, 173.
34. Edmund Ordon, “Mickiewicz and Emerson,” University of Buffalo Studies No. 1 (July 1956), p. 43.
35. Leopold Wellisz, The Friendship of Margaret Fuller d’Ossoli and Adam Mickiewicz (New York: Polish Book Importing Co., 1947), pp. 18, 13; Memoirs, II, 207.
36. Memoirs, II, 201-2.
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