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
CONTEMPORARIES ON FULLER
1. Defense of her political work, James Russell Lowell, July 12, 1849
In March 1849 a copy of Lowell’s satirical Fable for Critics (III:4) reached Rome, embittering Fuller (“I shall never again be perfectly, religiously generous . . . I am worse than I was” [Houghton MS]). Lowell’s friend William Story rebuked him: “The joke of ‘Tiring-woman to the Muses’ is too happy; but because fate has really been unkind to her, and because she depends on her pen for her bread-and-water (and that is nearly all she has to eat), and because she is her own worst enemy, and because through her disappointment and disease, which (things) embitter every one, she has struggled most stoutly and manfully, I could have wished you had let her pass scot-free” (Henry James, William Wetmore Story and his Friends, I, 171). Previously unaware that she was poor, Lowell regretted his attack, and later his wife and former patron of Fuller’s Conversations, Maria White, worked to quell malicious rumors about Fuller’s marriage. On June 27, 1849, Bishop John Hughes of New York City called for a collection “for the relief and support of the Pope” and, labeling the Roman Republic a reign of terror, noted that no foreign ambassador recognized it—excepting of course “the female plenipotentiary” of the Tribune. This blast gave Lowell his opportunity.
. . . The Roman revolutionists have been denounced as bloodthirsty rabble who coerced the orderly citizens by terror. This would be a priori an absurdity, even had it not appeared that no city could be so vigorously and successfully defended except by a unanimous people. It is a disgrace to America that she is not represented at Rome by a man with brain enough and heart enough to sympathize with the struggle of a race in whom fifteen centuries of bad government have not extinguished the memory of a glorious past. Bishop Hughes says sneeringly that the Roman Republic has been recognized only by the “female plenipotentiary of the Tribune.” It is a pity that America could not be always as adequately represented. But Miss Fuller has not merely contented herself with the comparatively cheap sympathy of words, though even brave words are much if spoken at the right time. We learn from private letters that, the last American left in Rome, she was doing her duty in the hospitals as a nurse for the wounded, thus performing also her mission as woman. Women have been sainted at Rome for less, and the Bishop is welcome to his sneer.
We cannot too often repeat that it is Slavery which has benumbed the heart of the American people. It is one chain which binds down the oppressed of whatever race or complexion all over the world. As long as we have our own private sham to maintain, we are co-partners with all other speculators in sham, wherever they may be . … [National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 12, 1849, p. 26]
2. In Rome with Ossoli, Emelyn Story [1852]
After Fuller’s death, Emelyn Story prepared a little manuscript book of recollections. All but the third, seventh, and eighth passages below are reprinted in the Memoirs, but there great liberties are taken with style and occasionally with tone and content. Thus although Channing omitted the third passage below, writing on the manuscript itself that he doubted its accuracy, in the fifth passage, he penned into Fuller’s bedside confession her concern for her “husband,” a word striking for its absence from all of Fuller’s accounts of Ossoli.
a. As soon as she heard of our arrival [in Rome, November 1847] she stretched forth a friendly, cordial hand, and greeted us most warmly. She gave us great assistance in our search for convenient lodgings, and we were soon happily established near her. Our intercourse was henceforth most frequent and intimate and knew no cloud nor coldness. Daily we were much together, and daily felt more sensible of the worth and value of our friend. To me she seemed so unlike what I had known her in America, that I continually said to her “how have I misjudged you—you are not [at] all such a person as I took you to be in America.” To this she replied, “I am not the same person, I am in many respects another, my life has new channels now and how thankful I am that I have been able to come out into larger interests—but partly, you did not know me at home in the true light.” I did not know her much personally, when in Boston; but through her friends, who were mine also, I learned to think of her as a person on intellectual stilts, with a large share of arrogance and little sweetness of temper. How unlike to this was she now—so delicate so simple confiding and affectionate with a true womanly heart and soul sensitive and generous, and, what was to me a still greater surprise, possessed with broad charity, that she could cover with its mantle the faults and defects of those about her.
We soon became acquainted with the young Marquis Ossoli, and met him frequently at Margaret’s rooms. He appeared to be of a reserved and gentle nature, with quiet, gentleman-like manners, and there was something melancholy in the expression of his face, which make one desire to know more of him. In figure, he was tall and of slender frame, dark eyes and hair and we judged that he was about thirty years of age, possibly younger.
b. [In that fall of 1847, Ossoli] became her constant visitor and as in those days Margaret watched with zeal and intense interest the tide of political events, his mind was also turned in the direction of Liberty and better government. Whether or not Ossoli unassisted would have been able to emancipate himself from the influence of his family and early education, both eminently conservative and narrow, may be a question but that he did throw off the shackles is true and that he gave the cause of Roman liberty his warm espousal is most certain—Margaret had known Mazzini in London, and partaken of his schemes for the future of his country and was watching with great interest the current events, as well as taking pains to inform herself in regard to action of all parties with a view to write a history of the Period. Ossoli brought her every intelligence that might be of interest to her and busied himself in learning the views of both parties that she might be able to view the matter impartially.
Here I may say, that in the estimation of most those who were in Italy at this time the loss of Margaret’s history and notes is a great and irreparable one. No one could have possessed so many avenues of direct information from both sides—While she was the friend and correspondent of Mazzini and knew the springs of action of his party—through her husband’s family and connections, she knew the other view. So that whatever might be the value of her deductions, her facts could not have been other than of highest value in this age of incorrect report and perverted statement. Together, Margaret and Ossoli went to the meetings of either side—and to her he carried all the flying reports of the day, such as he had heard in the café, or through his friends.
c. Not long after our coming to Rome, the old Marquis Ossoli died and as Angelo was his youngest (son) and only unmarried (one), the care of his father during his last illness fell upon him. A few hasty moments of these days of anxiety he went to pass with Margaret, who tried to console him in his deep affliction. When at length his Father died, he told Margaret that he (loved her) and must marry her or be miserable. She still refused to look upon him as a lover and insisted that it was not fitting, that it was best he should marry a younger woman—that she would be his friend but not his wife. In this way it rested for some time during which we saw Ossoli pale, dejected and unhappy. He was always with her but in a sort of hopeless, desperate manner attending her, until at length he convinced her of this love and she married him.
d. [In the spring of 1849] when it was certain that the French had landed forces at Civita Vecchia and would attack Rome, Ossoli took station with his men on the walls of the Vatican gardens, where he remained faithfully to the end of the attack. Margaret had, at the same time, the entire charge of one of the hospitals {the name of which I have forgotten), and was the assistant of the Princess Belgiojoso, in charge of “dei Pellegrini,” where, during the first day they received seventy wounded men, French and Romans.
Night and day Margaret was occupied and with the princess so ordered and disposed the hospitals that their conduct was truly admirable. All the work was skilfully divided, so that there was no confusion or hurry, and from the chaotic condition in which these places had been left by the priests, who previously had charge of them, they brought perfect regularity and discipline. Of money they had very little and they were obliged to give their own time and thoughts in its place. From the Americans in Rome, they raised a subscription for the aid of the wounded of either party, but besides this, they had scarcely any money to use. I have been through the wards with Margaret, and seen how comforting was her presence to the poor suffering men. “How long will the Signora stay?” “When will the Signora come again?” they eagerly asked. For each one’s peculiar tastes she had a care: to one she carried books; to another she told the news of the day; and listened to another’s oft-repeated tale of wrongs, as the best sympathy she could give. They raised themselves up on their elbows, to get the last glimpse of her as she was going away. There were some of the poor sturdy fellows of Garibaldi’s Legion there, and to them she listened, as with delight they spoke of their chief, of his courage and skill; for he seemed to have won the hearts of his men in a remarkable manner.
One thing I may as well say in this connection. It happened, that some time before the coming of the French, while Margaret was travelling in the country quite by herself, as she perhaps was returning from a visit to her child, who was out at nurse in the country, that she rested for an hour or two at a little wayside osteria. While there, she was startled by the padrone, who, with great alarm, rushed into the room, and said, “We are quite lost! here is the Legion Garibaldi! and these men always pillage and if we do not give all up to them without pay they will kill us.” Margaret looked out upon the road and saw that it was quite true that the legion was coming thither with all speed for a moment she said that she felt uncomfortably such was the exaggerated account of the conduct of the men that she thought it quite possible that they would take her horses and so leave her without the means of proceeding upon her journey. They came and she had determined to offer them a lunch at her own expense, having faith that gentleness and courtesy was the best protection from injury. Accordingly, as soon as they arrived, and came boisterously into the osteria, she rose, and said to the Padrone, “Give these good men wine and bread on my account for after their ride they must need refreshment.” Immediately the noise and confusion subsided with respectful bows to her they seated themselves and partook of the lunch giving her an account of their journey. When she was ready to go and her vettura was at the door, they waited upon her, took down the steps, and assisted her in with much gentleness and respectfulness of manner, and she drove off, wondering how men with such natures could have the reputation they had. And so far as we could gather except in this instance, their conduct was of a most disorderly kind.
e. [After an exhausting day at the hospital,) she called me to her bedside and said that I must consent for her sake to keep the secret she was about to confide—Then she told me where her child was, and when it was born and gave me certain papers and parchment documents which I was to keep, and, in the event of her death I was to take the boy to her mother in America and confide him to her care and that of her friend Caroline Tappan.
The papers thus given me I had perfect liberty to read but after she had told me her story I desired no confirmation of this fact, beyond what her words had given me. One or two of the papers she opened, and we together read them One was written on parchment in Latin, and was a certificate, given by the priest who married them, saying that Angelo Eugene Ossoli was the legal [words illegible] heir of whatever title and fortune should come to his father. To this was affixed his seal with those of the other witnesses, and the Ossoli crest was drawn in full upon the paper. There was also a book, in which Margaret had written the history of her acquaintance and marriage with Ossoli, and of the birth of her child. In giving that to me, she said “If I do not survive to tell this myself to my family, this book will be to them invaluable therefore keep it for them, if I live, it will be of no use for my word will be all that they will ask.” I took the papers and locked them up, never feeling any desire to look into them, as I never did, and as she gave them to me, I returned them to her, when I left Rome for Switzerland.
After this, she often spoke to me of the necessity there had been and still existed for her keeping her marriage a secret. At the time, I argued in favor of her making it public but subsequent events have shown me the wisdom of her decision- The explanation she gave me of the secret marriage was this: They were married soon after (I think, but am not positive) the death of the old Marquis Ossoli. The estate he had left was undivided and the two brothers, attached to the Papal household, were to be the executors. This property was not large, but when fairly divided would bring to each a little property, an income sufficient, with Roman economy for life in Rome. Every one knows, that law is subject to ecclesiastical influence in Rome, and that marriage with a Protestant would be destructive to all prospects of favorable administration. Beside being of another Religious Faith, there was in this case the additional crime of having married a Liberal,—one who had publicly interested herself in favor of radical views—Taking the two together, there was good reason to suppose, that, if it were known, Ossoli must be a beggar, and a banished man, under the existing government But waiting a little while there was a chance (a fair one too), of an honorable post under the new form of government which everybody anticipated. Leaving Rome, too, at that time, was leaving the field wherein they might hope to work much good, and where they felt that they were needed. Ossoli’s brothers had long before begun to look jealously upon him. Knowing his acquaintance with Margaret, they feared the influence she might exert over his mind in favor of Liberal sentiments and had not hesitated to threaten the Papal displeasure—Ossoli’s education had been such, that it certainly argues an uncommon degree of character that he was so firm and single in his political views, and was indifferent to the pecuniary advantages which his former position offered.
For many years, the Ossoli family had been high in favor and in office in Rome and he had the same vista for his own future had he chosen to follow their lead. The Pope left for Mole di Gaeta and then came a suspension of all Legal procedure—so that the estate was never divided before we left Italy and I do not know that it has ever been.
f. [During the siege of Rome] Ossoli’s post was one of considerable danger he being in one of the most exposed places, and as Margaret saw his wounded and dying comrades, she felt that another shot might take him from her, or bring him to her care in the hospital—Eagerly she watched as the carts came up with their suffering loads, knowing that her worst fears might be confirmed. No argument of ours could persuade Ossoli to leave his post to take food or rest, Sometimes we went to him, and carried a concealed basket of provisions, but he shared it with so many of his fellows, that his own portion must have been almost nothing. Haggard, worn, and pale, he walked over the Vatican grounds with us, pointing out, now here, now there, where some poor fellow’s blood sprinkled the wall. Margaret was with us, and for a few moments they could have an anxious talk about their child . . . .
To get to the child or to send to him was quite impossible and for days they were in complete ignorance about him. After waiting upon the Post Office with the anxiety that a Mother only can know at length a letter came but it only relieved her from her present anxiety with regard to the boy’s health to give her another cause of uneasiness—the nurse declared that unless means were immediately found for sending her, in advance payment, a certain sum of money, she would altogether abandon the child. It seemed at first impossible to send money, the road was so insecure, the bearer of any parcel was likely to be seized by one party or the other and treated as a spy. But happily after much consideration, the sum was sent to the address of a physician who had charge to look after the child and I think it did reach its destination, and for a while answered the purpose of keeping the wretched nurse faithful to her charge.
g. Many of our countrymen who saw [Ossoli] could discover little in him but that was rather because he was not quickly interested in others, than that he lacked interesting points. He was always reserved, and when with Margaret preferred always to hear her talk even when she spoke a language he did not know than to talk himself or hear any one else.
His manner toward Margaret was devoted and lover-like to a striking degree—He cared not how trivial was the service if he might perform it for her—I remember to have seen him one morning after they had been married nearly two years, set off on an errand to get the handle of her parasol mended with as much genuine knightly zeal as if the charge had been a much weightier one. As he took it [he] said “How sweet it is to do little things for you never attend to such yourself always leave them to me for my pleasure.” When she was ill he nursed and watched over her with the tenderness of woman. When she said to him, “How have you learned to be so good a nurse,” he said, “My Father was ill, and I tended upon him.” No service was too trivial, no sacrifice too great for him. He never wished her to give up any pleasure because he could not share it, but if she were interested, he would go with her to any house, leave her and call again to take her home. Such tender, unselfish love I have rarely before seen it made green her days, and gave her an expression of peace and serenity which before was a stranger to her face. “No companion in nature was ever so much to me as is Ossoli,” does not this show that his soul was deep and full of emotion, for who that knew Margaret would believe that any other companion would have been agreeable to her in her communion with nature. What a beautiful picture is that of their return to Rome after a day spent on the Campagna!
h. A [word illegible] friend one who (knew} Margaret often during the last winter in Florence tells me that the child was not of a healthy [word illegible], that a physician who has passed much time in study of diseases of the Brain has said he would never have lived to be a man. [BPL MS]
3. Evenings in Florence, Frederick Gale, December 15 and 29, 1849
On December 11, 1849, Frederick Gale wrote Anna, his sister and one of Fuller’s former Greene Street students, that he had just met “the quondam Margaret Fuller-now transformed, by marriage, into no less a personage than the Marchioness of Ossoli,” with husband and child both “depending upon her pen for a subsistence.” Never one of Fuller’s admirers, he concluded jubilantly, “Now that the scornful, manhating Margaret of 40 has got a husband, really no old maid need despair, while there is life in her body!” In his journal he offered two contradictory impressions of Fuller in exile from Rome.
a. In the eve to Mozier’s house, where I met a large company—mostly artists—among them Geo. P. Marsh (was not introduced) and Madame Ossioli [sic] & the young Marquis d’Ossioli, her spouse. I found her much older & uglier than I had anticipated. There are wrinkles & lines in her face, old enough for 60! Her husband is handsome & hardly looks 30. She appeared sad & depressed to me—bent in body & in fact an old woman before her time. The political events in Italy in which she had embarked, as it were, by her marriage with the Marquis—a rebel against the Pope & Officer in the service of the Republicans, have probably contributed to this result. But I heard nothing like that tone of scorn & contempt which I expected in her conversation. I talked a good deal with her, & chiefly about the sad manner in which the progressive movements of the recent struggles have been managed.
b. In eve to Mozier’s—met a large party of Americans—had a fine supper in which cold turkey, duck, maryonaise [sic], champagne & whisky punch played a prominent part—and the transcendental ex-editress of the Dial devoted herself with unmistakeable ardor to them all not even declining that vulgar, but comforting beverage—so unfashionable for Boston blues, the whisky punch. I danced two cotillions with her & found her none the worse for the liquor—but merry & agreeable. Her spouse says nothing. The ladies left before 2, but a party of gentlemen told stories & renewed the potations somewhat later. [E. A. Hoyt and L. S. Brigham, “Glimpses of Margaret Fuller: The Greene Street School and Florence,” New England Quarterly, 29 (1956), 98]
4. In Florence with Ossoli, William Henry Hurlbut [1852]
Fresh from Harvard Divinity School, the South Carolinian W. H. Hurlbut (1827-1895) visited Florence for six weeks in March and April 1850. Later (spelling his name Hurlbert), he became an influential journalist, but his reminiscence of Fuller’s and Ossoli’s life in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella is unctuous with deference. Among his tales of Fuller’s skill and bravery in resolving quarrels, her mornings of writing, evenings with friends, and occasional excursions to the hills with Ossoli, he offers valuable data on Ossoli and on Fuller’s response to Florence in defeat.
. . . I cannot remember ever to have found Madame Ossoli alone, on those evenings when she remained at home. Her husband was always with her. The picture of their room rises clearly on my memory. A small square room, sparingly, yet sufficiently furnished, with polished floor and frescoed ceiling,—and, drawn up closely before the cheerful fire, an oval table, on which stood a monkish lamp of brass, with depending chains that support quaint classic cups for the olive oil. There, seated beside his wife, I was sure to find the Marchese, reading from some patriotic book, and dressed in the dark brown, red-corded coat of the Guardia Civica, which it was his melancholy pleasure to wear at home. So long as the conversation could be carried on in Italian, he used to remain, though he rarely joined in it to any considerable degree; but if a number of English and American visitors came in, he used to take his leave and go to the Cafe d’ltalia, being very unwilling, as Madame Ossoli told me, to impose any seeming restraint, by his presence, upon her friends, with whom he was unable to converse. For the same reason, he rarely remained with her at the houses of her English or American friends, though he always accompanied her thither, and returned to escort her home.
I conversed with him so little that I can hardly venture to make any remarks on the impression which I received from his conversation, with regard to the character of his mind. Notwithstanding his general reserve and curtness of speech, on two or three occasions he showed himself to possess quite a quick and vivid fancy, and even a certain share of humor. I have heard him tell stories remarkably well. One tale, especially, which related to a dream he had in early life, about a treasure concealed in his father’s house, which was thrice repeated, and made so strong an impression on his mind as to induce him to batter a certain panel in the library almost to pieces, in vain, but which received something like a confirmation from the fact, that a Roman attorney, who rented that and other rooms from the family, after his father’s death, grew suddenly and unaccountably rich,—I remember as being told with great felicity and vivacity of expression . . . .
Though condemned by her somewhat uncertain position at Florence, as well as by the state of things in Tuscany at that time, to a comparative inaction, Madame Ossoli never seemed to lose in the least the warmth of her interest in the affairs of Italy, nor did she bate one jot of heart or hope for the future of that country. She was much depressed, however, I think, by the apparent apathy and prostration of the Liberals in Tuscany; and the presence of the Austrian troops in Florence was as painful and annoying to her, as it could have been to any Florentine patriot. When it was understood that Prince Lichtenstein had requested the Grand Duke to order a general illumination in honor of the anniversary of the battle of Novara, Madame Ossoli, I recollect, was more moved than I remember on any other occasion to have seen her. And she used to speak very regretfully of the change which had come over the spirit of Florence, since her former residence there. Then all was gayety and hope. Bodies of artisans, gathering recruits as they passed along, used to form themselves into choral bands, as they returned from their work at the close of the day, and filled the air with the chants of liberty. Now, all was a sombre and desolate silence. [Memoirs, II, 326-29]
5. Her last year, Elizabeth Barrett Browning [1852]
The elopement and move to Italy of Elizabeth Barrett (l806-1861) and Robert Browning (l812-1889) prevented Fuller’s meeting them until autumn 1849. Despite her own spectacular middle-age romance Elizabeth reported she was taken “by surprise” when Fuller came to Florence “with a husband and child above a year old. Nobody had even suspected a word of this underplot, and her American friends stood in mute astonishment before this apparition of them here” (Henry James, William Wetmore Story, I, 130). But, Robert wrote, they conceived a “quick love and respect for her” and saw her several times, Ossoli less frequently (Letters of Robert Browning, collected by Thomas J. Wise, p. 33). Though Elizabeth’s own republican ardor would grow in the coming decade, in 1850 she found Fuller’s opinions wild and pictured an embattled woman: “Her face & soul were full of furrows, through continual wrestling with the world” (Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, eds., P.N. Heydon and P. Kelley, p. 31). And even in grief over her friend’s death, she insisted Fuller’s writings failed to do her justice (“Her written works are just naught. . . . Never read what she has written” [Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F.G. Kenyon, II, 59]), always excepting the promised manuscript on Italy. The following letter was written to Mary Russell Mitford.
What still further depressed me during our latter days at Florence was the dreadful event in America—the loss of our poor friend Madame Ossoli, affecting in itself, and also through association with that past, when the arrowhead of anguish was broken too deeply into my life ever to be quite drawn out. Robert wanted to keep the news from me till I was stronger, but we live too close for him to keep anything from me, and then I should have known it from the first letter or visitor; so there was no use trying. The poor Ossolis spent part of their last evening in Italy with us, he and she and their child, and we had a note from her off Gibraltar, speaking of the captain’s death from smallpox. Afterwards it appears that her child caught the disease and lay for days between life and death; recovered, and then came the final agony. ‘Deep called unto deep,’ indeed. Now she is where there is no more grief and ‘no more sea;’ and none of the restless in this world, none of the shipwrecked in heart ever seemed to me to want peace more than she did. We saw much of her last winter; and over a great gulf of differing opinion we both felt drawn strongly to her. High and pure aspiration she had—yes, and a tender woman’s heart—and we honoured the truth and courage in her, rare in woman or man. The work she was preparing upon Italy would probably have been more equal to her faculty than anything previously produced by her pen (her other writings being curiously inferior to the impressions her conversation gave you); indeed, she told me it was the only production to which she had given time and labour. But, if rescued, the manuscript would be nothing but the raw material. I believe nothing was finished; nor, if finished, could the work have been otherwise than deeply coloured by those blood colours of Socialistic views, which would have drawn the wolves on her, with a still more howling enmity, both in England and America. Therefore it was better for her to go. Only God and a few friends can be expected to distinguish between the pure personality of a woman and her professed opinions. She was chiefly known in America, I believe, by oral lectures and a connection with the newspaper press, neither of them happy means of publicity. Was she happy in anything, I wonder? She told me that she never was. May God have made her happy in her death.
Such gloom she had in leaving Italy! So full she was of sad presentiment! Do you know she gave a Bible as a parting gift from her child to ours, writing in it “In memory of Angelo Eugene Ossoli”—a strange, prophetical expression? That last evening a prophecy was talked of jestingly—an old prophecy made to poor Marquis Ossoli, “that he should shun the sea, for that it would be fatal to him.” I remember how she turned to me smiling and said, “Our ship is called the ‘Elizabeth,’ and I accept the omen.” [Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F G. Kenyon (New York: Macmillan, 1898), I, 459-60]
6. The question of her marriage, Ralph Waldo Emerson [1850-51]
“I have lost in her my audience”—with this scrawl in his journal, upon learning of Fuller’s death, Emerson mourned an image of her that had actually faded years before. In writing Carlyle two weeks later, he looked almost coldly at what Fuller had become: “I doubt you never saw in her what was inestimable here. But she died in happy hour for herself. Her health was much exhausted. Her marriage would have taken her away from us all, & there was a subsistence yet to be secured, & diminished powers, & old age” (Rusk, Letters, IV, 224). Already he had talked with Channing about writing a life of Fuller, though, as he confessed to Ward, it would take considerable nerve: “I think it could really be done, if one would heroically devote himself, and a most vivacious book written, but it must be done tête exaltée, & in the tone of Spiridion, or even of Bettine, with the coolest ignoring of Mr Willis Mr Carlyle and Boston & London . . . . Nay, if for the glory & honour of Margaret such a hecatomb were prepared, and all scruples magnificently renounced, I think, when the first experiments came to be made, it might turn out to be a work above our courage” (Letters, IV, 222). There were difficulties obtaining materials and permission, and dilemmas of tact, but the problem of courage was the great one, and in a notebook Emerson kept for thinking through his memoir of Fuller, he confronted it head on in considering her marriage. The page of this notebook has been cut out after the mention of “Aglauron and Laurie,” Fuller’s work most critical of marriage. Very likely Emerson cited the passage in which a character speaks of the “sanctity” of marriage and praises it as “a means of bringing home to the mind the great idea of Duty.”
Marriage W.H.C. fancied that M. had not married: that a legal tie was contrary to her view of a noble life. I, on the contrary, believed that she would speculate on this subject as all reformers do; but when it came to be a practical question to herself, she would feel that this was a tie which ought to have every solemnest sanction; that against the theorist was a vast public opinion, too vast to brave; an opinion of all nations & of all ages. See what she says in Aglauron & Laurie; which is as follows. [Page cut.] [Emerson, Notebook on MFO]
7. Chronology of her movements, Ralph Waldo Emerson [1850-51]
At the end of his notebook, Emerson uses Fuller’s letters to trace her activities. Rarely can we find such neat cancellation—here by the stroke of a pen through the word “perhaps”—of disturbing ambiguity.
. . . 1847 Jan 31 Paris
April 15 Rome May 7
1 July Florence
10 July Venice
Aug 9 Milan
26 Bellaggio Lake of Como
Sept 15 Florence at the Moziers
Oct 28 Rome 29 Oct happy, alone, & free
Nov 2 Rome
Rome of Dec 47 has spent sweetly 2 of the 6 mos she feels in Rome
House expenses $50 per month
16 Dec Rome
married perhaps in Oct. Nov. or Dec
1848 Jan 11 Rome
Rome, 25 Feb. 1848
17 March Rains & headach from 16 Dec
20 May 21 May goes to Rieti
July 3 Rieti
Rieti Sept 5 Angelo Eugene Ossoli was born . . .
[Emerson, Notebook on MFO]
8. Florentine gossip, Nathaniel Hawthorne, April 3, 1858
Hawthorne’s reversal of feeling about Margaret Fuller was the opposite of Lowell’s. From the affection of his record of their friendship in Concord in 1842 (III:2), Hawthorne moved to the malignant virtuosity of this passage written in a journal in Rome eight years after her death. It was suppressed by Sophia in her 1871 selection from Hawthorne’s French and Italian notebooks, then published in 1884 by Julian, their son, in a new selection. Richard Fuller’s son, Frederick, published a defense of his aunt, demonstrating that Hawthorne’s informant, Mozier, was no intimate of Fuller’s and contrasting the picture of Fuller and Ossoli drawn by those who were. Mozier’s remarks about Ossoli’s family and Fuller’s literary development were simply wrong, and Mrs. Story’s testimony about the Italian manuscript contradicts Mozier’s. Sarah Clarke wrote that Mozier, a retired merchant turned sculptor, was an unscrupulous gossip driven by a desire to ingratiate himself with distinguished people (BPL MS). And Moncure Conway, who investigated in Rome the story of Ossoli’s abysmal sculpture, found it to belong rather to “the career of one Germano, a poor and dishonest Italian whom Margaret had befriended until he was proved an imposter.” (Mozier took Germano into his studio, possibly at her request, until it was learned that he had bought cheaply the work he was selling as his own and at extravagant prices.) Conway speculated that Mozier mentioned Germano to Hawthorne as an instance of Fuller’s poor judgment, and that Julian had both incorrectly deciphered his father’s notes and omitted an account of Mozier’s attack on Fuller’s moral character which alone could account for his father’s vehemence (Transcript of Conway’s letter from Rome, February 12, 1890, in hand of Arthur Fuller’s daughter Edith, Houghton MS). Surely Fuller’s frank response to sexual need lies at the heart of this assault. It is likely too that her combining sexual honesty with intellectual activity and political commitment in Rome was even more threatening to Hawthorne and that the ambivalence of his treatment of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance (1852) reflects his response to what Fuller had become.
Despite the indignation of Fuller’s friends, Julian offered no apology for exhuming this passage. In the Boston Evening Transcript of December 31, 1884, he boasted, “The majority of readers will, I think, not be inconsolable that poor Margaret Fuller has at last taken her place with the numberless other dismal frauds who fill the limbo of human pretension and failure.” He was right about the majority, and the image Hawthorne sketched here has endured and spawned scores of apocryphal tales as no image of Fuller’s defenders has done.
. . . [Mr. Mozier] called to see us last night, and talked for about two hours in a very amusing and interesting style; his topics being taken from his own personal experience, and shrewdly treated. He spoke much of Greenough, whom he described as an excellent critic of art, but possessed of not the slightest inventive genius. His statue of Washington at the Capitol, is taken precisely from the Phidian Jupiter; his Chanting Cherubs are copied in marble from two figures in a picture by Raphael. He did nothing that was original with himself. From Greenough, Mr. Mozier passed to Margaret Fuller, whom he knew well, she having been an intimate of his during a part of her residence in Italy. His developments about poor Margaret were very curious. He says that Ossoli’s family, though technically noble, is really of no rank whatever; the elder brother, with the title of marquis, being at this very time a working bricklayer, and the sisters walking the streets without bonnets—that is, being in the station of peasant girls, in the female populace of Rome. Ossoli himself, to the best of his belief, was Margaret’s servant, or had something to do with the care of her apartments. He was the handsomest man whom Mr. Mozier ever saw, but entirely ignorant even of his own language, scarcely able to read at all, destitute of manners; in short, half an idiot, and without any pretensions to be a gentleman. At Margaret’s request, Mr. Mozier had taken him into his studio, with a view to ascertain whether he was capable of instruction in sculpture; but after four months’ labor, Ossoli produced a thing intended to be a copy of a human foot; but the “big toe” was on the wrong side. He could not possibly have had the least appreciation of Margaret, and the wonder is, what attraction she found in this boor, this man without the intellectual spark—she that had always shown such a cruel and bitter scorn of intellectual delinquency. As from her towards him, I do not understand what feeling there could have been, except it were purely sensual; as from him towards her, there could hardly have been even this, for she had not the charm of womanhood. But she was a woman anxious to try all things, and fill up her experience in all directions; she had a strong and coarse nature, too, which she had done her utmost to refine, with infinite pains, but which of course could only be superficially changed. The solution of the riddle lies in this direction; nor does one’s conscience revolt at the idea of thus solving it; for—at least, this is my own experience—Margaret has not left, in the heart and minds of those who knew her, any deep witness of her integrity and purity. She was a great humbug; of course with much talent, and much moral reality, or else she could not have been so great a humbug. But she had stuck herself full of borrowed qualities, which she chose to provide herself with, but which had no root in her.
Mr. Mozier added, that Margaret had quite lost all power of literary production, before she left Rome, though occasionally the charm and power of her conversation would reappear. To his certain knowledge, she had no important manuscripts with her when she sailed (she having shown him all she had, with a view to his securing their publication in America;) and the History of the Roman Revolution, about which there was so much lamentation, in the belief that it had been lost with her, never had existence. Thus there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was, after all, kind in putting her, and her clownish husband, and their child, on board that fated ship. There never was such a tragedy as her whole story; the sadder and sterner, because so much of the ridiculous was mixed up with it, and because she could bear anything better than to be ridiculous. It was such an awful joke, that she should have resolved—in all sincerity, no doubt—to make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of the age; and, to that end, she set to work on her strange, heavy, unpliable, and, in many respects, defective and evil nature, and adorned it with a mosaic of admirable qualities, such as she chose to possess; putting in here a splendid talent, and there a moral excellence, and polishing each separate piece, and the whole together, till it seemed to shine afar and dazzle all who saw it. She took credit to herself for having been her own Redeemer, if not her own Creator; and, indeed, she was far more a work of art than any of Mr. Mozier’s statues. But she was not working on an inanimate substance, like marble or clay; there was something within her that she could not possibly come at, to re-create and refine it; and, by and by, this rude old potency bestirred itself, and undid all her labor in the twinkling of an eye. On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better for it,—the better, because she proved herself a very woman, after all, and fell as the weakest of her sisters might. [The Portable Hawthorne, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1948), pp. 594-97]
9. Meditation on her meaning, Henry James [1903]
It is tempting to see Margaret Fuller lightly veiled in any number of Henry James’ characters—the mesmerizing or predatory feminist, the expatriate lady with a dim scandalous past, the bold foreign correspondent, the young American heroine seeking a richer freedom in Europe. James was only seven when Fuller died, but his curiosity about his predecessors, the pioneer Americans deliberately exiled in Europe, was always vivid. It led him to write the life of William Wetmore Story and his friends. “Among the ghosts . . . of the little related, vanished world,” none but Margaret Fuller “looks out at me more directly and wistfully.” It is clearly as a ghost, to whet his imagination, that Fuller most interested James, for he appeared ignorant of her republican sympathies and repeated Elizabeth Browning’s dismissal of Fuller’s writing. (Mrs. Browning’s sense that Fuller’s marriage was an “underplot” also gives him his cue below.) We also feel in this passage that even the few facts about Fuller he knew were indigestible to his imagination and thus haunted it.
. . . On March 24th, our kindly diarist [Emelyn Story] “went home with Margaret and sat with her in her quiet little upper chamber all the evening. W. came for me, and we stayed until a late hour of the night.” The unquestionably haunting Margaret-ghost, looking out from her quiet little upper chamber at her lamentable doom, would perhaps be never so much to be caught by us as on some such occasion as this. What comes up is the wonderment of why she may, to any such degree, be felt as haunting; together with other wonderments that brush us unless we give them the go-by. It is not for this latter end that we are thus engaged at all; so that, making the most of it, we ask ourselves how, possibly, in our own luminous age, she would have affected us on the stage of the “world,” or as a candidate, if so we may put it, for the cosmopolite crown. It matters only for the amusement of evocation—since she left nothing behind her, her written utterance being naught; but to what would she have corresponded, have “rhymed,” under categories actually known to us? Would she, in other words, with her appetite for ideas and her genius for conversation, have struck us but as a somewhat formidable bore, one of the worst kind, a culture-seeker without a sense of proportion, or, on the contrary, have affected us as a really attaching, a possibly picturesque New England Corinne?
Such speculations are, however, perhaps too idle; the facts of the appearance of this singular woman, who would, though conceit was imputed to her, doubtless have been surprised to know that talk may be still, after more than half a century, made about her—the facts have in themselves quite sufficient colour, and the fact in particular of her having achieved, so unaided and so ungraced, a sharp identity. This identity was that of the talker, the moral improvisatrice, or at least had been in her Boston days, when, young herself, she had been as a sparkling fountain to other thirsty young. In the Rome of many waters there were doubtless fountains that quenched, collectively, any individual gush; so that it would have been, naturally, for her plentiful life, her active courage and company, that the little set of friends with whom we are concerned valued her. She had bitten deeply into Rome, or, rather, been, like so many others, by the wolf of the Capitol, incurably bitten; she met the whole case with New England arts that show even yet, at our distance, as honest and touching; there might be ways for her of being vivid that were not as the ways of Boston . . . .
. . . The “underplot” was precisely another of the personal facts by which the lady could interest—the fact, that is, that her marriage should be an underplot, and that her husband, much decaduto, should make explanation difficult. These things, let alone the final catastrophe, in short, were not talk, but life, and life dealing with the somewhat angular Boston sibyl on its own free lines. All of which, the free lines overscoring the unlikely material, is doubtless partly why the Margaret-ghost, as I have ventured to call it, still unmistakably walks the old passages. . . . [William Wetmore Story and his Friends, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903), I, 127-31]
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