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 VI
The Radical in Italy
Looking back from her new Roman vantage point in May 1847, Fuller wrote, “Paris is the very focus of the intellectual activity in Europe. There I found every topic intensified, clarified, reduced to portable dimensions; there is the cream of all the milk, but I am not strong enough to live on cream, at present.” She thought half-apologetically of her “trance of repose” in Italy among “people so indolently joyous”1 as a respite, an indulgence of weary body and hungry senses; she always intended to return to Paris, in her mind the school for the most advanced social thought. She may have heard there of Louis Blanc, who had carried socialism about as far as it could go while still abjuring class struggle. His popular pamphlet proposed “social workshops” to be financed by the state, controlled by the workers, and open to all seeking employment. In another year such schemes and social reality itself were “intensified” and “clarified” to a degree neither Fuller nor Blanc could have anticipated. For in February 1848, the working class joined with the middle class in overthrowing the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe and made Louis Blanc the member for the extreme left of the Provisional Government. But his promised “right to work” and his workshops were sabotaged and travestied as the actual irreconcilability of the needs of the two classes emerged, and four months later the bourgeois republicans crushed the workers in pitched battle. These events gave birth to modern political consciousness, serving, as Marx saw it, to reveal that “bourgeois republic signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes” and to redefine revolution from then on as class struggle.2
Fuller never returned to Paris, and she would not have expressed the meaning of 1848 as Marx did. But she watched events in Paris with excitement and a precocious awareness that they were effecting irreversible change in political consciousness. Hindsight tempts us to believe Italy held her by teaching her more fundamental lessons than she would learn in the school of Paris. She learned that the needs of her body could not be met by a mere vacation in Italy to be followed by renewed intellectual vigor and continued physical deprivation. In Italy she took a lover and bore a child, acts of self-discovery and release which, as we shall see, tended more to complement than to conflict with her political development. Then, Fuller’s political education up to 1847 prepared her to understand the evolving situation in Italy better than that of Paris. In effect, she had to experience the national struggles of Italy, which partly echoed America’s past, before she could appreciate, even intellectually, the social challenges and class struggles of Paris, which prefigured the political future of the world.
Since the political experiences of Italy and of Fuller are so interconnected in what follows, it may be helpful at the outset to outline and distinguish them. In Italy—with the partial exception of Milan-there were none of those conditions which bred social ferment in Paris: the living memory of the balked French Revolution, the stimulating and abundant activity of social theorists, the tradition of student insurgency, and the rise of an industrial proletariat and consequently of class consciousness. Even nationalist ideas were virtually nonexistent in Italy until the French Revolution and Napoleon’s notion of Italy had suggested them. And with the Congress of Vienna of 1814, Italy was again subjected to reactionary and foreign domination. Metternich’s remark that Italy was only a “geographical expression” was borne out not only by the division of Italy into eight separate states but also by its almost total control by Austria. In the north, rich Lombardy and Venetia were part of the Austrian Empire, and Hapsburgs sat on the throne of Tuscany, Parma, and Modena; in the south the Kingdom of Naples, or the Two Sicilies, ruled by a Spanish Bourbon, was virtually an Austrian protectorate; and the Papal States, which belted Italy across the middle, deferred to Vienna. Only in the northwest, in the Kingdom of Piedmont (also called Sardinia) was there a relatively independent and native Italian dynasty, the House of Savoy, represented since 1831 by the intermittently liberal Charles Albert. Although the unsuccessful risings of the Carbonari and Mazzini’s Giovine Italia gave sporadic life to the notion of an independent, constitutional, and unified Italy, there was no real change until the election in 1846 of the liberal Pope Pius IX. Proclaiming universal amnesty for political prisoners, the Pope later included laymen in a council of state and authorized a civic guard, a symbol of order to conservatives, independence to liberals, and revolutionary readiness to radicals. By these measures Pius IX simultaneously undermined his temporal power and excited Italians in other states to press for reforms.
From 1847, when Fuller arrived in Italy, to the middle of 1849, the Risorgimento, or national revival, accelerated rapidly. In 1847, a spirit of moderate liberalism, dictated chiefly by the work of the exiled priest Vincenzo Gioberti, prevailed. Depicting an idealized and reformed Papacy presiding over a loose federation of Italian kingdoms and duchies protected by the armed force of Charles Albert, Gioberti made Mazzini’s scheme of republican union seem romantic madness. But in 1848, reforms, uprisings, and revolutions in Italy and the rest of Europe began to generate popular demands for more radical change and to expose the inability of the moderates, the Pope, and Charles Albert to accomplish it. Pressures for the formation of a unified Republic led to the Pope’s flight from Rome and the return of Mazzini. In 1849, Charles Albert abdicated after military defeat, but the creation of a democratic Roman Republic fired the zeal of young men all over Italy. They flocked to Rome’s defense when the new French president, Louis Napoleon, sent his army to destroy the Republic and restore the Pope. With the French victory, the Pope initiated a fierce reaction and Austria regained her hegemony over Italy. (It was not until a decade after the fall of Rome and Fuller’s death that two men, both by then enemies of Mazzini—Garibaldi with his military triumphs and Cavour with his Machiavellian diplomatic gifts-achieved Mazzini’s goal of unifying Italy.)
To the Italian experience Fuller brought a political awareness which had grown swiftly after she abandoned New England and the apolitical posture she had cultivated there. What she learned in New York of social inequity and unprincipled and aggressive foreign policy began to undermine her faith in the saving power of leaders or the reliability of “divine destiny,” though no new systemic criticism and no fundamental solution replaced it. Her travel in England and France sharpened her sense of social crisis. What she had perceived as inequity in America now began to look like hopeless class division, but, like most of her contemporaries and virtually all of her class, Fuller could barely frame the problem in these terms. The inspiration of Mazzini and the experience of revolution in a country industrially and politically less mature than England and France provided a necessary transition to the modern radical analysis toward which she was moving when her life ended.
In replacing the spiritual literary exemplar with the practice of direct, exemplary action, Mazzini satisfied Fuller’s earliest bias, learned from the Romans and long suspended in her contact with the Transcendentalists. His doctrine that war was the inevitable instrument of nationalism fell in with her temperamental penchant for conflict and her growing impatience with reform. While he strengthened her radical bent in these ways, the political implications of his romantic collective vision were more ambiguous, and the impact on Fuller was complex. As a repudiation of individualism, his habit of considering people in the mass was progressive; as a bulwark against class analysis, it was reactionary. Mazzini was not unaware of class; in 1844, he distinguished the class owning land, credit, and capital from that dispossessed of all but their hands, and he wrote that political revolution alone was inadequate to the needs of the latter. But he argued that the political revolution necessarily came prior to the social one. Moreover, he did not conceive of social revolution dialectically; rather it was a process of absorption and dissolution whereby each new era moves toward a more perfect equilibrium adding social -elements to the preceding era. The form of social change he favored, for his time, was the voluntary association of workers into ever-larger units. Class warfare he considered antipathetic to the collective principle, immoral, and unjust. In short, his republican and nationalist priorities fed his desire to minimize the differences between classes and kept his perspective essentially bourgeois. Consequently, he rarely used the word “proletariat,” preferring the more comprehensive and evocative “people.” And although he used “people” variously to designate all classes in a nation, or the population neither aristocratic nor clerical, or the class subject to the bourgeoisie, it is significant that he usually meant “the middle and lower middle classes and the tradespeople,” excluding the laboring classes beneath them.3
While Fuller’s friends and acquaintances were generally drawn from the upper-class intelligentsia, the effect of Mazzini’s collective approach was to direct her attention as never before to the “people” of Rome, especially to the middle and lower-middle classes which preoccupied him. (Indeed, she often remarked on the absence, even fear, of political consciousness in the lower classes, especially among peasants.) But her attention carried her beyond her mentor in some respects. For while both Mazzini’s long exile and political priorities led him to minimize gradations and conflicts of social need in his countrymen, Fuller’s lifelong interest in the education and fulfillment of individuals made her curious about just such questions when she turned to the group. Greeting the rapid development of the Roman crowds with great excitement, she was also a sharp observer of their relationship to political events and of the growth of their autonomy. Finally, as we shall see, this attention led her to make some class distinctions which in turn made her want a more thoroughgoing social revolution than Mazzini did.
Fuller’s ceaseless scrutiny of the state of consciousness in the people and in herself gave most of her twenty-one dispatches from Italy more concentrated force and shapeliness than anything else she wrote. The effect she achieves in the dispatches as a whole is panoramic: it involves quick sketching of conditions in Germany, Austria, and France, with shrewd predictions of the political and social evolution to be expected in those countries, denser drawing of the mounting struggles throughout Italy with their interlocking dynamics, and a close, slowly evolving portrait of the Pope and the people of Rome. She is especially absorbed by the Pope’s gradual decline in leadership and the people’s steady rise in self-determination. Sometimes these dispatches show the marks of haste, for the imminent departure of a steamer often kept Fuller from even reading them over. Sometimes they are crabbed or obscure when her involvement was too intense to permit leisurely exposition, but the old self-indulgent attitudinizing is absent. More partisan than anything she did before, her writing in this last period is more intimately a part of her action and her feeling, in no way an expression of a choice in which something else is sacrificed. In these dispatches, all her values are intact and so focused and actualized that they make her accounts of hopefulness, restlessness, political suspense, and battle, riveting even now. Caught up in Mazzini’s vision and the dazzling excitement of events, she tends to overestimate the Italians’ power and the likelihood of victory and to underestimate the real limitations on Charles Albert’s options and, for a while, the value of Garibaldi. But she is otherwise perspicacious. Urgency drives the old wishfulness out of her social analysis. And in her assessments of the motives of rulers and priests, she draws on a fund of skeptical insight wholly new in her writing. Something of the bite and flash said to characterize her conversation at last dominates her work.
Fuller arrived in Italy when enthusiasm for Gioberti and “Gioberti’s Pope,” Pius IX, prevailed in the progressive middle class, which judged Mazzini’s goal of fusion premature, his measures desperate and doomed. While Fuller’s preference for Mazzini’s vision held firm, in the open and optimistic political atmosphere of 1847 she met people entertaining a variety of views. Her friendship with the remarkable Marchesa Costanza Arconati Visconti, formed soon after her arrival in Rome, paved the way for these connections. Nine years older than Fuller, this gracious woman, with “a mind strong, clear, precise and cultivated,” had just returned from twenty-six years of political exile with her husband, during which time their salon had been a center of liberalism, both literary and political. Now settled in Florence, they collaborated actively with other Catholic federalists, finding Gioberti, as she told Fuller, the “pole-star for us who are not republicans.”4 Arconati was in a position to introduce Fuller to political activists, leading writers, and intelligent women, and she showered her with books, journals, and occasional gifts of money. She readily became the woman closest to Fuller in Europe. Their correspondence is remarkable both for simple affection and candid exchange of political information and opinion, sometimes sharply divergent.
An altogether different friendship was formed in those stimulating spring days5 when, wandering in St. Peter’s after vespers one day, Fuller was separated from the Springs, and a young man, handsome though somewhat melancholy in expression, offered to assist her in finding them. Giovanni Angelo Ossoli was like Costanza Arconati only in noble birth. His father and one of his brothers were high-ranking papal functionaries and the other two brothers were colonels in the Pope’s Guardia Nobile. From the priests he had received only the minimal education requisite to follow their lead. But, though a good Catholic, Ossoli did not believe the Pope should hold temporal power and was interested in a unified and republican Italy. After he escorted her home, Fuller wrote of the encounter to her friend Mickiewicz, who had followed up his original challenge to her virginity by exhorting her to “breathe life through your pores,” to saturate herself with Italian life, and in admiring Italian women to remember that she too was beautiful. Now more vigorously he urged her to prolong her good moments, not to leave lightly those drawn to her like “the little Italian” she met in the church. Much later, Fuller wrote her sister that Ossoli had proposed marriage shortly after their meeting, “but the connection seemed so every way unfit, I did not hesitate a moment” (VI:48). Unfit, she must have felt, because he was ten years younger and had none of her intellectual accomplishments or curiosity. On the other hand, their very differences satisfied old and interlocking needs of both. Ossoli, the youngest of six children, close only to his two sisters, and still grieving for the mother who died when he was six, needed a confident, even authoritative, woman. And in responding to his beauty, gentleness, and capacity for devotion, Fuller was cherishing the “feminine” in him, as she had valued in Ward, Nathan, her brother Richard, and others, the way they eluded “masculine” stereotyping. She said later he was most like her brother Eugene, of whom she had written in a journal three years earlier, “How all but infinite the mystery by which sex is stamped on the germ! . . . Impossible to trace. Here am I the child of masculine energy and Eugene of feminine loveliness.”6 In moving toward Ossoli she would be confirming her ideal of androgyny and of a union where character flourishes free of expectations fixed by sex.
But first she evaded him and even, by a curious recoil, pursued an American painter, Thomas Hicks, virtually demanding his intimacy and succeeding in arousing that mixture of devotion and panic she had elicited in other men. We have no letters between them except their first, but they seem to have settled into an enduring friendship. When she confessed to Tribune readers that she could not describe Italy without long residence in districts untouched by foreigners and “without an intimacy of feeling, an abandonment to the spirit of the place impossible to most Americans,”7 she may have been referring to Hicks’ inhibitions as well as her own.
So strong was the diffuse attraction of Rome that it was painful to her to resume the tour with the Springs in June. But the gifted acquaintances of Costanza Arconati in Florence, Milan, and Bellagio did much to compensate. Despite a political stalemate in Florence, she saw that “within, Tuscany burns” and was thrilled by the “rush of thought to the new vent” of the freed press. In Milan, she met some of the young radicals who would form a provisional government in the uprising next year; she admired them more than the great writer, Manzoni, feeling Italy needed “a more active faith” than his doctrine of “pray and wait.”8 By the end of the summer, Fuller had covered more ground in Italy than Mazzini, who before his exile knew only Genoa and Tuscany, and she was getting in position to make judgments and commitments of her own.
In Venice, she declined to travel further with the Springs, even though they were going on to Germany, for, as Goethe himself had done, she was dreaming of Rome. As she wrote to Richard Fuller, “I should always suffer the pain of Tantalus thinking of Rome, if I could not see it more thoroughly … for it was all outside the two months . . . I had only just begun to live with their life.”9 To others she wrote of a change in her feelings, of a desire to move “inward.” In this new context, the indispensable word of the Transcendentalists meant a complex of things wholly changed: a desire to be done with sight-seeing, to ignore art, to concentrate on the fundamentals—living economically, speaking the language of the “common people,” mastering the “great future” of Italy. As moving “inward” earlier signified to Fuller the self’s desire for transcendence, now it reflected the self’s desire for immanence, for rooting itself in the material and the actual.
An “inward” life may also have meant a life responsive at last to the stirrings of desire, sharpened perhaps by regret over her restraint with Nathan, by her flight from Ossoli, and now by more uncanny sympathetic insinuations from Mickiewicz. She must not limit her life to books and dreams, he wrote during the summer: “You have pleaded the freedom of women in a masculine and frank style. Live and act as you write . . . . I have seen you, with all your knowledge, and all your imagination, and all your literary reputation, living in a bondage harder than that of a servant . . . . The relations that are right for you are those which develop and free your spirit while answering the legitimate needs of your body. You are the only judge of those needs.” If she was to be a woman of the new epoch, he argued, she must part from her traveling companions and seek freedom.10 Whatever its source, it was a “strong impulse” that led her back to Ossoli in October 1847, very soon to become his lover.
Later, in stoic accents dictated by hard times, she wrote her sister, “I neither rejoice or grieve—for bad or for good I acted out my character” (VI:48). At the time, it was the act of loving Ossoli—and all that stood for—that made her character clearer, more cohesive, than it had been. How Fuller changed by loving Ossoli has been much misunderstood. Most biographers of her century suggested that the pose of the arrogant eccentric was simply cast aside, revealing the Victorian “true woman.”11 Some in our century see the modern, sexually balanced woman burning at last through Puritan repression. But there never was much “true womanhood” about Fuller’s feelings. It is entirely possible that she never married; she lived apart from Ossoli until their last year, as much from choice as from the need of secrecy; and, though she grew markedly tender, the deference was all on his side. And sexual fulfillment was immensely important, but it was so because her love for Ossoli was bound up with a series of new convictions shaping Fuller’s character.
“The Italians sympathize with my character and understand my organization as no other people ever did,” she wrote her mother at this time. “They admire the ready eloquence of my nature, and highly prize my intelligent sympathy (such as they do not often find in foreigners) with their sufferings in the past and their hopes for the future.”12 Plainly, the relation between Fuller and Ossoli was part of this broader dynamic of understanding and sympathy, which was a matter not simply of mutually delighted temperaments but of idealistic and revolutionary recognition. Evidence that their love grew in this spirit is Ossoli’s daring the wrath of his family by enlisting in the largely nationalist Civic Guard on November 15. At the same time, Fuller sought a “divorce” from the English and American circle. Much later, W. H. Hurlbut, an American acquaintance who found Ossoli an “underdeveloped and uninteresting Italian,” speculated, “she probably married him as a representative of an imagined possibility in the Italian character which I have not yet been able to believe in.”13 This surmise is sound; all her life Fuller had committed herself to “imagined possibilities”—in herself, her friends, the Indians, her students, the ladies of Boston, and the prostitutes of New York—but in Italy for the first time Fuller’s commitment to possibility was total.
The experience of Italy then satisfied and fused the disparate longings of a lifetime; emotional fullness and heroic action at last came together. Moreover, it clarified for her the source of her frustrations with America in her time. She felt the impulse and meaning of the American Revolution alive in Italy as they were not at home except in the abolitionist cause, which she now learned to honor. And she worked to revitalize that spirit in her homeland by exhibiting for Americans its rebirth in Italy. Hence we have the curious picture of Fuller late in 1847 suffering from all that is “peculiarly American and English,” wishing she could shut out the sound of the language, while pouring it out to exhort her countrymen. Or we see her refusing until 1850 the entreaties of Emerson and her family to repatriate because she had most to say to America from Italy. This refusal richly symbolizes the ways in which she repudiated Emerson’s perspective. At stake was more than the rejection of the life of the mind for the life of action. Fuller and Emerson differed over nothing less than the relation of the individual to American destiny, the autonomy of that destiny, and their understanding of national growth. Emerson’s identification of the individual’s “latent conviction” with the “universal sense” of Americans, his “conflation of the private with the national dream,” made ordinary action beside the point and, despite all the excitement it generated, posed no critical cutting edge to established society. Fuller’s response to Italy (“Italy receives me as a long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here”) meant the fundamental abandonment of her attempt to be a “representative” American in Emerson’s sense, the acceptance of her otherness, and her wish to use that very otherness to cut through to an American essence that was betraying itself with accelerating speed. For Emerson, a great American destiny would unfold with a speed directly related to America’s autonomy, to her success in extracting “this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen”; he offered his representative self as a guide to fulfilling that destiny. Fuller denied the specialness and autonomy of American destiny; she offered the actual struggle of a foreign people as a guide to completing the American Revolution, and entering a brotherhood of nations. Emerson’s model of national growth was singular and organic; the nation and the reliant self unfold together in the unique context of a beneficent American nature. Fuller’s model was multiple and morally dialectic; nations change under the pressure of challenges posed them by other societies.14
So Fuller remained in Italy, understanding that only in this way could she hope to prize her nationality, only by invoking Rome’s imminent future could she serve America’s present. In this posture she differed not only with Emerson at home but with the other Americans who came as “passionate pilgrims” to Europe. Quite precisely she inverted Cooper’s formulation of 1838: “The Roman glorifies himself in what his ancestors have been, the American in what his posterity will be.” Her evolving bias led her beyond those who sought in Europe, especially in “eternal Rome,” unchanging values to use in distinguishing and consciously shaping values suited to their still formless and mutable home. When this ideal and static Europe conjured out of American need exploded in revolution, especially when Rome erupted in sudden turmoil, the pilgrims were devastated, and their reflexes were conservative.15 With regard to the Italians, it had long been the habit of these devotees to distinguish between Rome as a temple of art and her apparently unrelated and unworthy race of custodians and tenants, famous only for theft, beggary, and voluble lying. Americans could not abruptly regard this same people as the stuff of heroic struggle, and the assessment of Fuller’s skeptical acquaintance “impulsive and ill-disciplined children of passion”—ranked with the kinder judgments. Fuller observed succinctly that “there is an antagonism of race.”16
Unlike the other pilgrims, Fuller was prepared even before she saw Rome to welcome rapid social progress, for her father had taught her to value chiefly the secular democratic virtues and military pride of ancient Rome, and Mazzini had led her to believe these would swiftly be recovered. Moreover, she gradually threw off most traces of her culture’s prejudices against Italians. Indeed, her developing attitude toward them is the core of the drama in her dispatches, although at first the character of Pius IX engaged her interest more than the people did. Pius IX was a man of incompatible impulses. On the one hand liberal enough to see the need for reform and Italian enough to resent the interference of the Austrians, he was on the other hand thoroughly devoted to the interests of the church. While his reforms and nationalist sympathies built popular support for the Papacy, they had the effect of limiting his temporal power. (Much later, when he had tasted the bitter fruits of his liberal nationalism, the Catholic in him recovered with reactionary virulence, eventually issuing the Syllabus of Errors, defining the doctrine of papal infallibility, and rejecting the modern world wholesale.) While Fuller never failed to note that his position was inherently contradictory, she was moved by his “goodness” and his apparently sincere spiritual depth. (The reasons appear partly autobiographical, especially when she laid a tender stress on the sight of him “absorbed in his devotions,” or wrote, “It makes me very happy to be for once in a place ruled by a father’s love.” It is as if she spent on the Pope for the last time her orphaned feelings of dependency and the fervent spirituality of her adolescence, before exorcising them forever.) But at the same time, her growing knowledge of the people was leading her to praise them, though sometimes at first as children who were maturing, cultivating such skills as “prudence,” “wise docility,” and “singular discretion.”17 By December she was regretting that the Pope was still fearful of his people—that he had, for instance, barred the display of other states’ flags at the inauguration of the new Council. That a group of American expatriates had, like Betsy Ross, sewn a flag for the occasion, gaily inquiring of newcomers about the current number of states at home, only made Fuller feel worse about this prohibition.
In the last months of 1847, the growing demand for liberty in the political sphere was strangely matched in Fuller’s private life by a feeling of widened freedom combined with deepened engagement. The shock of happiness made her impatient with her fate, with not having had money to come to Italy long ago, and “ find those that belong to me, or at least try my experiments; then my health would never have sunk, nor the best years of my life been wasted in useless friction.” Useless friction? Only something on the order of a revelation could have evoked this laconic dismissal of those years of searching, of rapture and agony. We have to read the letters of this period as a sort of code in which she protects the conspiracies sometimes of Mazzini’s friends, sometimes of her heart. Her letters to friends written in New England seven to ten years earlier were also in code, but that was the sign of self-mystification and repression, this of purpose and release hidden only from outsiders. “I have not been so well since I was a child,” she wrote her mother, “nor so happy ever, as during the last six weeks.”18
It was the old story: this clear and simple joy was betrayed by biology, and early in the new year she discovered she was pregnant. One desolate cry to Caroline Sturgis is all that survives of her feelings. The desolation of a woman in the nineteenth century, of chronic poor health, finding herself pregnant at thirty-seven, hardly needs explanation. But in Fuller’s case there were factors that made it harder to bear: the loss of freedom of action just as she had begun to taste it, the bitter awareness that the social and economic questions she would now be addressing were all too domestic, her recent discovery that Uncle Abraham had remained angry at his impertinent niece, leaving her no legacy,19 and her by then philosophical opposition to all but perfect marriages. Even the weather conspired against her; it was an unceasingly foul winter in Rome, raining steadily the first three months of her pregnancy. In January 1849, her Tribune letters took a virulently anti-Catholic turn, attacking the superstition, the antipathy to reform, and the repression of women imbedded in the faith. She deplored the Pope’s fear of being called a Protestant Pope and, with a true Yankee reflex, found disgustingly abject the sight of the new municipal officers kissing his foot. Some of her animus may have sprung from her resentment over an aspect of her dilemma—the impossibility, for a Protestant, of getting a papal dispensation to marry Ossoli, should she have wanted to do so, without the knowledge and probably the consent of his father. The old Marchese would have been appalled by her age, her lack of wealth and status, and especially her republicanism, and would have disowned Ossoli. With his father’s death in February, Ossoli’s position worsened; his eldest brother, Giuseppe, forced him to move from his father’s rooms to his sister’s and would have welcomed the opportunity provided by such an inappropriate marriage to disinherit him. Ossoli stood by Fuller, but she found thin comfort in a love made of “all fondness, but no help” (VI:22).
Fuller seems to have turned with relief from the impasse of the private struggle to the exhilaration of the public one. In the first months of 1848, uprisings flared like a string of firecrackers lacing Europe. Italy took the initiative, as Mazzini had prophesied. First Sicily, teased beyond endurance by the false promises of Ferdinand II, rose, and Naples, following, forced from the king a popular constitution. His example led Charles Albert of Piedmont and the Grand Duke of Tuscany to grant constitutions, and they in turn obliged the Pope to follow suit. Meanwhile, the Milanese, in imitation of the Boston Tea Party, boycotted the tobacco and lotteries heavily taxed by the Austrians; the result was fierce repression. The February revolution in Paris inspired the uprising in Vienna and the consequent flight of Metternich in early March; this last stroke triggered the “Five Glorious Days” of street-fighting in Milan, which issued in the expulsion of the Austrian garrison. At the same time, Venice proclaimed itself an independent republic. Seeing an opportunity to rule a unified northern Italy, Charles Albert declared war on Austria and invaded Lombardy. Italian troops swarmed up from Tuscany, Naples, and even the Papal States to help rout the Austrians from Lombardy, then from Venetia.
In the middle of these events, Mickiewicz, the man Fuller most wished to see again, if she returned to France, came to Rome to recruit a legion from the Poles in exile there. She probably confided in him, for after he left with his legion for Florence, he wrote urging her to shake off melancholy dreams and scolding her for her terror over “very natural, very common suffering.”20 By March and April, she had recovered her joy, now in a fiercer strain. She exulted in the fall of Louis Philippe and the revolutionary courage of the troops marshaled in Rome. “It is a time such as I always dreamed of; and that fire burns in the hearts of men around me which can keep me warm,” she wrote. “Have I something to do here? or am I only to cheer on the warriors, and after write the history of their deeds? The first is all I have done yet, but many have blessed me for my sympathy, and blest me by the action it impelled.”21
For all her force of sympathy, her political acumen grew more rapidly. She began to develop a perspective that gave her a remarkable measure of independence from the three leading nationalist tendencies. She had from the outset considered the goal of the Giobertists, a federation of Italian states under Pius IX, too modest. And they were finally discredited at the end of April by the Pope’s Allocution disclaiming responsibility for the very war he had implicitly blessed and by his recall of his forces. As for the supporters of Charles Albert, she was no more deceived by the republicans who thought they could use him than by Giobertists who called him “Sword of Pius IX”; behind the mask of the crusader she early discerned the opportunistic empire builder. Charles Albert, however, was himself deceived. Trying by vague gestures to appease and appropriate all factions, his vacillation (which earned him the name Re Tentenna, or King Wobble) became habitual and he ended by neutralizing himself. Moving with such unstable allies against the overwhelming might of the Austrians was bad enough. But the inexperience of the Italian military, their foolish scorn for gaudy Garibaldi and his guerrilla legion, freshly arrived from Uruguay, and the noncooperation and sabotage of the Lombardy peasants, worn out from Napoleonic incursions, also told against him. Then he lost the troops of Rome, and the King of Naples called home his army to help bombard insurgents in his own cities (for which he was nicknamed King Bomba). Finally, the general triumph of counterrevolution in Paris and Prague killed the hope for French military support and guaranteed the return in force of Austria. In July 1848, driven back from Venetia, back from Lombardy, Charles Albert signed an armistice.
Fuller’s allegiance to Mazzini and the republicans remained strong, but she showed, especially in the spring of 1848, a disposition to be critical of him. An early indication, which does not mention Mazzini, was her strident celebration in the Tribune of the “nobility” of the “laboring classes” in the February revolution in Paris and of the merging there of social and political revolution. In affirming class struggle in Paris, Fuller was boldly taking the step explicitly refused by both the Utopian socialists and Mazzini. She was also moving beyond her exhortations to Americans to regenerate their revolution by emulating the spirit of the Italian republicans; the Paris revolution, an internal struggle of classes, was for Americans a more ominous model, calling not for regeneration but for drastic change. She urged her countrymen to “learn in time for a preventive wisdom” how to forge a “true democracy” (VI:25).
In her next dispatch, she criticized Mazzini directly, writing that, even with his great dream of “political emancipation, Mazzini saw “not all,” that he ignored or denied “that of which the cry of Communism, the systems of Fourier, etc. are but the forerunners.” She declined to elaborate “in the small print of the Tribune” (VI:27), and we are left to wonder about several things. It is extremely unlikely that she had read or heard of the Communist Manifesto, printed two months earlier in London.22 But she might have been reacting against fresh news from Milan, where Mazzini had recently arrived. When a delegation of tailors approached him demanding better working conditions, Mazzini insisted on their subordinating even those just needs to the great struggle for Italy. It is possible that her position, initially more conservative than Mazzini’s, had become more radical, as she had familiarized herself with the people he still preferred to consider abstractly and had seen how the process of revolution had schooled and tempered them. But it is also possible that she was thinking along different lines, not of a class struggle but of restructuring the family. It is probable that she was contemplating both kinds of social revolution at once; however far apart they later became, they lay then, in the cradle, side by side.
Support for this last interpretation comes from a letter written on May 29 to her friend Mary Rotch, just before Fuller left Rome to hide her swelling belly in the country. “You must always love me whatever I do,” she begins, with the anomaly and danger of her condition on her mind. “I depend on that. And this thought puts me in mind to ask whether you are not aware that I am as great an associationist as W. Channing, himself, that is to say as firm a believer that the next form society will take in remedy of the dreadful ills that now consume it will be voluntary association in small communities. The present forms are become unwieldy.” If she slips into social thought to keep from confessing private fact here, it would not be the first time. But they may have been connected: if she was not married, saw no clear way to becoming married, and was not enthusiastic about the institution of marriage, it is likely she was contemplating social arrangements that would tolerate, even endorse, such irregular arrangements and help support her child. (We note that for the first time she does not take exception to Fourier’s materialism on behalf of the spirit; in fact, this dimension of her rhetoric is almost completely eliminated after Fuller was touched by the material facts of politics and pregnancy.) When she goes on to say, “But what I think on this subject I hope to have force and time to explain in print. Not in the Tribune,”23 the echo of this unexplained reserve about the Tribune rings like a prohibition. The explanation may lie in the outcome of the debate on Fourierism, in the columns of their newspapers, between Henry J. Raymond of the Courier and Enquirer and Greeley, in the winter of 1846-47. Unable to rattle Greeley in his defense of Fourier’s economic thought, Raymond had finally assailed Fourier for asserting that passions were intrinsically good and restraint evil. Though Greeley vigorously denied that socialism as Americans understood it provided for any such criminal license, the debate soon and abruptly ended.24 That Raymond was right about Fourier Fuller would not have known from Albert Brisbane’s sanitized presentation of Fourier for Americans but may well have learned about after arriving in Europe. In fact, Fourier was a pioneering radical feminist, not only advocating sexual equality but also criticizing in detail the institutions of marriage and the family. Fuller’s reiterated mention of his name in public and private writing suggests he was in possession of a scheme of values she wanted and increasingly needed to accept.
To Mary Rotch she confided that she hoped “in the silence and retirement of the country” to write more about this and other subjects. She sent to Hicks (now embroiled in the Paris revolution and soon to shelter two fugitive insurgents there) her personal papers, a cache of newspaper clippings, and a forlorn note, mentioning neither marriage nor pregnancy, to be opened in the event of her death. Then she packed up her collection of newspapers, books, tracts, pamphlets, and government documents, along with her daguerrotype of Ossoli, and set out for Aquila in the Abruzzi mountains. Letting her friends imagine she was in another town, she relied on Ossoli to forward her letters, bank drafts, and newspapers.
At first, she settled happily in this town encircled by snow-covered mountains. Daily she walked or rode a donkey by “grain fields enamelled with the brilliant blue corn-flower and red poppy . . . like nothing in America.” She rejoiced that the peasants were “remote from the corruptions of foreign travel”; they in turn called her “simpatica” and blessed her as she passed. “They are people whom I could love and live with. Bread and grapes among them would suffice me,” she wrote Emerson. She told Arconati that she tried to catch up with her hundred correspondents, but devoted the “great part of the day” to a history of the Italian struggle, which she predicted would take three months: “It grows upon me.”25 By that time double-entendre was second nature and the alibi of a writing retreat so convenient for her confinement that we cannot be sure of the reality of her stated intentions at this time. But loneliness and fear of the future soon began to assail her. Refusing Richard’s entreaties to return home, she begged him to sell the last of her property, as Greeley’s last remittance had been lost. After two months, to be close enough for Ossoli, who was now working for his uncle, to visit her Sundays, she moved to rooms by the river in the ancient town of Rieti.
This was the moment, however, that Charles Albert was driven back by the Austrians to Milan and then to his own domain. Provocatively, the Austrians moved within the Papal States to attack Bologna, and the Civic Guard, including Ossoli, was kept in suspense awaiting the Pope’s response. Ossoli was suddenly confronted by the dilemma of neoclassical tragedy, but the love and honor he had to choose between wore modern dress: his love was a militant begging for news of her revolutionary friends in Milan and honor was the equivocating Pope. So torn was Fuller that she began one letter to Ossoli raging at Pius IX (“Oh! how unworthy the Pope is! He seems now a man without a heart! And this traitor of a Carlo Alberto! they’ll be damned for all the centuries to come”) and ended it with an unusual effusion of tenderness (“I love you in these important days better than ever. The moon has been so beautiful these last nights, it has pained me not to have your company”). Three days later, fear for her life made her reflect bitterly, “Not often does destiny demand a greater price for some happy moments,” but she added quickly, “Never do I repent of our affection.”26 For once her self-interest and the Pope’s cold caution coincided. The Pope declined to send the guard to assist the Bolognese, who drove back the Austrians without it. Ossoli was thus free to come at the end of August to Rieti and remained until September 5, when their son, Angelo Eugenio Filippo Ossoli, was born.
Though she had written in her journal years before of her maternal longing (“I have no child of my own, and the woman in me so craves this experience it seems the want of it must paralyze me”) and had intensely loved a few children, Fuller was unprepared for the actual shock of motherly feeling: “I know nothing about it.” She marveled over the baby’s “really delicate ways, like a dancer,” and the people in the house called him “Angiolino, because he is so lovely.”27 (She and Ossoli took their cue and called the baby Angelino.) The loss of her milk, the avaricious schemes of the women in the house, the landlord’s efforts to seduce the nurse—nothing could destroy this new rapture. She urged Ossoli to devise a way to bring the child to Rome, but he felt it imprudent. In their letters the next month they came near assuming conventional sex roles. His anxiety was the Pope’s appointment of an unpopular minister, hers the job of finding a wet nurse. Then he had to find a legal way of baptizing the baby, and she a means of protecting the baby from a smallpox epidemic when there was no vaccine in Rieti. Finally Ossoli found vaccine and sent it from Rome. He also secured a devious form whereby he could pose as proxy for the absent parents at the child’s baptism and omit the names of the parents; this subterfuge would hardly have been necessary had they been married. Unfortunately, Ossoli’s nephew who had helped with this scheme became godfather, instead of Mickiewicz, who was their first and richly appropriate choice.
Needing both to secure the ten dollars Greeley paid for each dispatch and to be near the struggle, Fuller returned to Rome, the mere sight of which moved her more than ever before. She was just in time for the crisis, made inevitable by six months of tension between the Pope and his advisers on the one hand and the Civic Guard and the volatile democratic clubs, or circoli, on the other. The Pope’s appointment as minister of Pellegrino Rossi was an open affront to the circoli; Rossi had in exile become Louis Philippe’s ambassador and friend of the conservative bourgeois Guizot. Inspired by Venice’s resistance and the growth of democracy in Tuscany, the circoli called for war with Austria and a new constitution, both opposed by Rossi. Working alone, contemptuous of the people, Rossi sought to preserve the temporal power of the Pope from the forces both of reaction and revolution; he assumed nearly dictatorial power and called on the papal troops to back it. These same troops made no move when Rossi was murdered before their eyes on November 15. Nine days later, disguised as a plain monk, the Pope fled to the shelter of the King of Naples.
Fuller’s maternal tenderness worked in no way to blunt the fierce satisfaction she took in the end of Rossi or her bitter grief over the weakness of the Pope. In the context of this treachery, Mazzini seemed to stand alone “on a sunny height” and she never again qualified her praise. She resumed writing for the Tribune and urged that America send a sensitive and forceful ambassador, remarking that were it “another century” she might ask for the position herself. At this point, Fuller’s selfhood seemed only fortified, not domesticated, by motherhood. Though she rushed to spend a week with the baby at Christmas, she needed equally to be in Rome to witness its triumphs, She was present for the opening of the Constituent Assembly (the first ever elected in Italy by universal manhood suffrage), when Garibaldi marched with the other deputies, for the proclamation of the Republic, and for the arrival of Mazzini in the great “Third Rome” of his vision. Unfortunately, we do not know what she made of the social measures of the republicans—the abolition of flour taxes, the provision of work to the unemployed artists and tailors, the confiscation and redistribution of Church landholdings, the conversion of the office of the Holy Inquisition into apartments for the poor of Trastevere-which wrought a social revolution second only to that in Paris the year before.28
In March 1849, as the dying embers of revolution flared briefly again all over Europe, Charles Albert, whose defeat the year before had given Italy over to the republicans, broke his armistice with Austria. His defeat at Custoza within his own kingdom eleven days later had the effect of winning the country back for the moderates.29 Meanwhile, the Pope had been preparing for reaction, secretly applying for the intervention of his four nearest neighbors. By April, armies of Naples and Austria were moving toward Rome from the south and the north by land, and Spanish ships were steaming from the west. As for the French, Fuller had speculated even in January on the likelihood of French intervention, but others, including Mazzini, gave the new president, Louis Napoleon, the benefit of the doubt, recalling his youthful involvement with the Carbonari. Her instincts here were more sound, for with the swing to the right of the French Republic, the president judged that a swift victory at Rome was a solid means of securing Catholic support. Hence he offered an expeditionary force ostensibly as a stabilizing agent.
“I have never yet felt afraid when really in the presence of danger, though sometimes in its apprehension,”30 Fuller once wrote. The formula helps us to understand the disparity between her acceptance of the exaggerated fears in Rieti of Garibaldi (VI:40), a man she was unusually slow to understand, and her composure when she actually met his legion (VI:2d), or between the recurrent morbid predictions that burden her letters at this time and her refusal to leave Rome in its greatest emergency. For after three weeks with her child in the spring of 1849, she returned to Rome, which soon she could not leave again.
Within days after her return the French landed and were marching toward Rome, ignoring the high-sounding phrases from their own constitution painted on the walls by the road. Both the Romans, who thought the French would not attack a republic, and the French, confident that Italians never fight, were mistaken. On April 30, the French attacked Rome and were driven back by the forces of Garibaldi, who was restrained by a fatally optimistic Mazzini from driving them into the sea. On this day, Fuller received a note from the Princess Cristina Trivulzio Belgioioso (whom Mazzini had put in charge of the hospitals) asking her to direct the Hospital of Fate Bene Fratelli on the small island in the Tiber.
Belgioioso was a remarkable woman who, for youthful anti-Austrian activity, had spent many years in exile presiding, like Arconati, over a brilliant salon. Unlike Arconati, however, she was ardent, flamboyantly beautiful, and emancipated. She had had several lovers; she had conducted Fourier-like experiments on her estates, providing communal quarters, schools, and a factory for impoverished peasants; and when she heard in Naples of the “Five Glorious Days” at Milan, she chartered a steamship to carry volunteers there. She even offered to create and lead a truly popular political party for Charles Albert. With some moral hesitation, Arconati herself had introduced Fuller to Belgioioso more than a year before. Eventually Arconati turned on the princess, finding scandalous her appearances at political clubs and cafés and her demagogic marches with tricolor banners on the streets. How close Belgioioso and Fuller became and how much her freedom may have inspired Fuller’s we do not know. But Fuller honored her in print for her intrepid dedication and for eluding the political narrowness of the Italian nobility.
After the French were driven back to their camp, there was a month of suspense. While Garibaldi’s guerrillas were harassing King Bomba’s troops back to Naples, Mazzini was tricked into negotiations by which the French bought time to gain reinforcements. Scenting a rat, Fuller dubbed the May negotiations the “Second Act of the French farce.” The diaries of Emelyn and William Story, her nearest friends at that time, make rather an operetta of the siege. They describe drifting from a rally to the theater, putting in time hearing “some very bad music” or running charitable errands, like taking money to the hospital for the princess, who had been three days without sleep. “Then we went to Spillman’s to get her an ice-cream to cool her parched throat, and while we were there came screaming and hooting a crowd which dragged along two cardinals’ carriages magnificently painted and gilt. These with pickaxes and clubs they broke entirely to pieces and set fire to, crying out, “this is the blood of the poor!—‘E il sangue dei poveri!’ “Then back to princess, the ice miraculously intact.31
Very different was the drama of Fuller in those days, rarely glimpsing Ossoli with his troops in the Vatican gardens, and getting notes from the nurse in Rieti threatening to abandon the child if money wasn’t sent, and working long hours at the hospital. In this capacity she subverted the official detachment of America and acted as ambassador for the other America she was urging into life in her dispatches. Being locked in Rome to tend wounded heroes while her own child lay possibly neglected in the unreachable hills must have wrought displacements in her feelings. Finally it worked to break down the ferocity of her partisan zeal and her enthusiasm for martyrdom. She was especially broken after June 3, when the French, strengthened by seasoned troops from the Algerian wars, launched a surprise attack. Then followed a month of battle, and the hospitals began to fill. “You say, you are glad I have had this great opportunity for carrying out my principles,” she wrote in anguish to the stiffly righteous Channing; she confessed her courage failed her at last. Lamenting over “the beautiful young men, mown down in their stately prime,” she burst out, “I forget the great ideas, to sympathize with the poor mothers, who had nursed their precious forms, only to see them all lopped and gashed” (VI:45). Yet what made the image of “these noble, bleeding martyrs, my brothers” so potent for Fuller was precisely their “great ideas.” And so she wrote wearily, yawing back and forth between the irreconcilable poles of her feeling, “After the attempt at revolution in France failed, could I have influenced Mazzini, I should have prayed him to capitulate, and yet I feel that no honorable terms can be made with such a foe, and that the only way is never to yield; but the sound of musketry, the sense that men were perishing in a hopeless contest, had become too terrible for my nerves.” And she described a last meeting with Mazzini after the French entered Rome on July 4, in a way that accented her limitations:
All that made for her joy when the revolution was rising—the fusion of lover and partisan—worked to redouble her anguish when it came crashing down.
For one more moment she felt the synthesis, but it was the wholeness not of joy but of desperate courage. That was on June 30, after a night of unusually heavy bombardment from the French camp. She called Lewis Cass, Jr., the United States charge d’affaires, to her rooms to give him papers for her family in the event of her death. She explained that she planned to spend the night with her husband, who commanded a battery on the Pincian hill. Cass wrote later: “That being the highest and most exposed position in Rome, and directly in the line of the bombs from the French camp, it was not to be expected, she said, that he could escape the dangers of another night such as the last, and that therefore it was her intention to remain with him and share his fate.”33 They survived, but the Roman Republic did not, and rarely after that did she experience the strength that comes from the integrity of self.
“Private hopes of mine are fallen with the hopes of Italy. I have played for a new stake and lost it,” she wrote to Richard. Had the Republic triumphed, Fuller might have witnessed the culmination of the stunning development of the people and the evolution of new institutions. She might have raised her son in that salutary atmosphere. For her and for Ossoli—whose bravery and authority during the siege had won him a promotion—work for the Republic would have emerged and commitment continued to give their lives form. The proud inhospitality of most Romans to the entering French troops fired Fuller’s hope for “perpetual resistance”; but she also noted that beggars began again to “swarm” as soon as the “black ravens” of the Church came out of hiding.34 The last work she did for the Republic was to secure passports and American protection for some of the republican leaders-beyond this nothing, not even writing, as she was no longer able to face pain “without the power to aid.” As for Ossoli, reared for a life he had repudiated, the life he was making for himself now lay in ruins, and he was bitterly depressed.
All that was left them was the life of their son—and that barely, as they found him starving in Rieti. Living together at last and caring for the sick child in Rieti and then in Florence provided a private happiness that Fuller and probably Ossoli had not known since childhood. Partly because the future had just been emptied of all promise, and partly because nothing drew her away from the baby’s growth and the “power and sweetness” of Ossoli’s presence, Fuller lived for the first time wholly in the present. Of the child’s response to her, she wrote a friend, “So sweet this unimpassioned love; it knows not dark reactions, it does not idealize, and cannot be daunted by the faults of its object . . . . I wish you had a child. Nothing else can take the worst bitterness out of life.”35
Ossoli’s love for her was apparently of a piece with the child’s feeling, adding essentially devotion and responsibility. It had no element of romantic challenge and freed her for self-acceptance, from the curse of forever “anticipating” her life. When she told Arconati he had “little of what is called intellectual development” but that having seen “the great faults in characters of enthusiasm and genius,” his unspoiled instincts, quiet sense of duty, and constant affection held “the highest value” for her,36 she was not simply apologizing or bravely accepting him faute de mieux. She was recognizing the crucial distinction between others, who “loved me with a mixture of fancy and enthusiasm, excited by my talent at embellishing life,” and Ossoli, who “loves me from simple affinity” (VI:51). Nowhere is more light shed on her relations with Ossoli, or with her mother, than when she compares the tenderness of their love for her and expresses confidence that they, in particular, will love each other when they meet.
This is not to say that her liaison with Ossoli fed only the pathological hungers of her childhood, though it did that. (“Since my father’s death,” she wrote Ward, “I have never been so well as at present.”37) Saying “In him I found a home, and one that interferes with no tie” (VI:46a), suggests that this relationship combined her childish and orthodox needs with her mature and independent ones. For now that she knew genuine love, she also knew, accepted, and conceivably welcomed its limits. It had taken her almost all of her life to grasp the two lucid conditions of the love she needed: that it could only be simple, and that it could not be all-consuming. She found her tie to Ossoli barred her from very little, and she even thought about how to guarantee the same freedom for him.
But Fuller had learned nothing in her progress out of New England if not that private happiness is a delusion when cut off from work in the world with others. Though in Florence she cultivated, with man and child, a circle of generous friends and a round of simple pleasures, she had no access to the work she required. The precious synthesis came to her only in contorted glimpses, as when, sitting with her child in the elegant parks of a Florence again under despotic rule, she watched the human panorama, lovely children, little dogs, “M. de Corceilles who helped betray Rome and the elegant Austrian officers who will be driven out of Italy when Angelino is a man” (VI:50). In this dream of revolution she was no participant.
Then it became clear that even private happiness was as chancy as public struggle. Police surveillance and the fear of spies dogged the couple on one side, the need of money on the other. Friends and family had helped sustain them through loans and presents, but now the child was better, and they had to find some livelihood.38 Fuller resumed work on her history of Italy. Surviving accounts of this book are inconsistent. Though it might have been only a pretext for her isolation in Rieti, she plainly had saved a vast assortment of materials for four years. Though at one point in the last year she disparaged what she had accomplished, more often she spoke of it as the most important thing she had done. Except for her long researches on Goethe’s life, it was the only work she did not toss off. Emelyn Story told friends she had held the manuscript in her hands, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning said that on the eve of her departure for America Fuller spoke as if it were far from finished. Apparently, she sent a description or a part of it to publishers in England, who rejected it because they had either too little or—for the conservative British audience—too much to go on. In any case, she had played out her hand: time and resources were gone. She was convinced there was nowhere to turn but to America.
Homesick and pregnant in Aquila, Fuller had daydreamed of a single day’s return home, but even in fantasy feared rejection there. A year later, a dream of visiting Anna Ward in her Lenox home was more explicit:
The fear expressed here of alienation, the inaccessibility of beauty, and the hostility of society was apt enough, but indifference was the wrong word for the American response. When the story of Ossoli and their child unleashed what she termed “the social inquisition of the United States,” she might have been grateful for a little indifference.39
Early in 1850, Frederika Bremer, a Swedish visitor to America wrote that rumors of “a Fourierest or Socialist marriage, without the external ceremony” provoked sudden attacks and eloquent defenses in Fuller’s circle. It is provocative that no originals survive of letters in which she broke the news at home, and that there are no records of a wedding date. It is likely she offered no details about her marriage and gave only general reasons for delaying the announcement. In a letter to Fuller, Sarah Clarke complained frankly that she found herself “in a most unpleasant position” because she had no hard facts and “the world said injurious things of you which we were not authorized to deny”; she concluded, with penetration, “to me it seemed that you were more afraid of being thought to have submitted to the ceremony of marriage than to have omitted it.” Fuller’s terse and proud stance indeed suggests this possibility: that by revealing little of her marriage she signaled the unorthodox way in which she viewed it and fended off the embrace of society, the belated initiation into the stifling rites of “true womanhood.” Knowing the grim futility of having her marriage understood by her own criteria, she thus refused to be understood by those of society. The simpler explanation is, of course, that she was lying, that she had never been married, or was married well after she had conceived or given birth. Respectability helped to prevent most of her biographers from choosing this last interpretation of her spare and cryptic explanations. There is also the potent identification of Margaret Fuller with truthfulness. Yet she was no stranger to partisan exaggeration and had used subterfuge for Ossoli and the child. That Ossoli, too, wrote his sisters of his marriage only from Florence adds to the mystery, which with present information remains unresolvable.40
Whether or not Fuller was taking home a finished book and a legitimate marriage may never be ascertained, but the ideas for her book and the nature of her relationship with Ossoli virtually guaranteed a cool welcome. When Elizabeth Barrett Browning said Fuller would be thrown to the wolves in America for her “socialistic” opinions, she was surely not referring to her support of Italian republicanism, which had broad liberal approval in America and which the Brownings themselves, though more mildly, shared. We do not know why Mrs. Browning judged her “one of the out and out Reds,” but it is possible that Fuller talked with her about both aspects of socialism: organizing the workers and reorganizing the family. In her last month in Florence she was returning mentally to Paris, studying what had happened in 1848 in its more critical revolution. She was examining both its liberal sources in Lamartine’s massive Histoire des Girondins, which in 1847 had reawakened enthusiasm for the moderate goals of the French Revolution, and its socialist roots in Louis Blanc’s L‘Histoire des Dix Ans, 1830-40, a five-volume attack on the reign of the bourgeoisie. This rich study suggests she was preparing to write something more broadly historical and possibly theoretical than her impressions of the Italian struggle. If so, and if she had lived to sort out her judgments of Mazzini and to have analyzed the difference between nationalist and social revolution, the loss of this book is incalculably greater than is generally imagined. In addition to studying European events, she was writing to the Springs inquiring eagerly about their impressions of the North American Phalanx in Red Bank, New Jersey. In the rhetoric of this Fourierist colony, no sexual distinction affected work responsibility and rights, and the “relationship of the sexes” was a question freely to be settled “by woman herself.”41 If her book developed these two socialist strands and the connection between them, it might have had some difficulty finding a publisher or an audience in America. (A letter from Sarah Clarke put it mildly that a personal account of her experiences would probably prove more lucrative than what she was writing.42) And even if the book never saw the light, Fuller’s notions of sexual relationships and roles were probably too advanced for the North American Phalanx, and the French socialist notions too extreme for even Greeley to entertain. Among the letters she carried on board the merchantman “Elizabeth” on May 17, 1850, was one freshly received from Marcus and Rebecca Spring, the most forward-looking of her friends, who, having taken counsel with Emerson and Channing, urged her to remain abroad.43
She was returning to those she loved and who loved her, but her way of loving now was somewhat alien to her old friends; it was bound up with a knowledge of self and society they did not share and were no more likely to grasp under conditions of life in America than she had done. The love of her friends is perhaps best revealed by the letters of her brother and W. H. Channing after her death. In order to copy extracts of her papers for publication, Richard wrote to his sister, Ellen, that he had employed a copyist who promised discretion. He himself would copy from those “objectionable to be shown to him,” but if she found papers which he himself should not see, Ellen or their mother should copy the extracts themselves. Channing’s aggressiveness thirty years later is simply the other side of the coin from Richard’s shrinking from knowing all about his “beautiful and dear sister.” Having heard that Higginson was writing a new biography, he wrote a redundant and ranting letter, insisting that Higginson stress her perfection, the spiritual, ideal, and moral character of her genius, her practical wisdom, and her “all-pervading, all-refining religiousness.” Then he added, in confidence, his assurance that “my estimate of this noble person was juster, deeper, purer, truer, loftier than has ever been given elsewhere.44 (Channing was, ironically, one to whom Fuller wrote with unusual candor about the limitations of her marriage.) Apparently, the American myth of the ideal woman required the refusal of knowledge of her even after death.
Fuller’s fear of the sea voyage—her superstitious dread for herself and Angelino, her recollection that a fortuneteller warned Ossoli against it—was the outward sign of her intimate understanding that the person she had become could never go home to America. The long trajectory of her short life was not circular. To respect herself and her insistent energy she had first to use what was at hand in America, to go the route of idealism, transcendence of the material aspects of her condition. When this had made her strong enough, she left New England and began in New York to apply her energy more directly to the material reality of her self and her world; but her mystified sexuality and her dependence on notions of divinely ordained national destiny show that she was still subject to American limitations of mind. Only in Italy did she come to understand the meaning of her most intimate prayer, “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.” She learned that reality was what she had meant, though her culture had taught her to call it truth. She learned that love, made of generous commitment to the autonomy of both persons, was only obscured by her obsession with ideal passion, and that the need to recast relations between sexes and between classes was only obscured by her country’s idealistic pride.
Fuller faced death all the way home. First the captain of the “Elizabeth” died of smallpox, then Angelino, infected, struggled nine days for his life. Late on July 18, 1850, the mate told them they would dock the next day and everyone packed. But near four in the morning a storm drove them into the sands of Fire Island, the cargo of Carrara marble broke through the hold, and the ship stuck fast, canted sideways. There followed twelve hours of shipwreck. As the cabin gave way, the passengers scrambled across the ravaged deck to the relative safety of the forecastle; Fuller thus abandoned her manuscript and materials.45 As the light came up, they could make out the shore, fifty yards away, and eventually people appeared, but these were salvage pirates not rescuers. (Later, to his horror, Channing learned that some of those on shore would have attempted rescue had they known anyone “important” was on board.) For some time, they watched each other over the roiling waves, then, the captain’s widow, clinging to a plank, as the ship’s boats had been lost, made it to shore with a sailor. Fuller would not follow, refusing to be separated from Ossoli and the child. The mate and all but four seamen then abandoned them. At last, the steward seized the child and leaped into the sea, but both drowned before reaching shore. Shortly afterward, Ossoli was washed away, apparently without Fuller, in her distraught condition, grasping the fact.46 As she sat at the foremast, her hair loose over her white nightdress, facing America, the cook heard her say, “I see nothing but death before me.”47 It was an extreme image of her condition. So she stayed, until the wave broke that tore her away, poised, arrested, frozen in her final hesitation, staring at the unresponsive land.
Notes
1. Letter to Mary Rotch, Eliza Farrar’s Quaker aunt, Houghton MS.
2. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 24.
3. Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini, trans. I. M. Rawson (New York: Crowell Collier, 1962), p. 146.
4. Memoirs, II, 220; Emma Detti, Margaret Fuller Ossoli e i suoi corrispondenti (Florence, Italy : Le Monnier, 1942), p. 229.
5. Emelyn Story, the source of the anecdote, did not specify the date, and we do not know why W. H. Channing penned “Holy Thursday” into her account for publication in the Memoirs. Holy Thursday fell on April 1 in 1847.
6. Detti, pp. 312-13, 309; Emerson, Notebook on MFO, p. 270.
7. At Home and Abroad, p. 220.
8. Ibid., p. 231, 237.
9. May 29, 1848, Houghton MS.
10. Detti, p. 312.
11. Thus Sarah Josepha Hale, in Woman’s Record (New York: Harper & Bros., 1853), suggested that Fuller’s loss of her taste for German literature before her death might be a sign of redemption. And a British reviewer of the Memoirs wrote that “from the time she became a mother till the final tragedy, . . . she was an altered woman and evinced a greatness of soul and heroism of character so grand that we feel disposed to extend to her whole career the admiration and sympathy inspired by the closing scenes” (Westminster Review, LXVII (April 1852)). In Portraits of American Women (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919), Gamaliel Bradford offers the most concise version of this school: he says she learned in Italy that “the height of self-culture is to forget culture and to forget self” (p. 162).
12. Joseph Jay Deiss, The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1969), p. 86.
13. Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1846-1906, ed. Mary Higginson (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), pp. 29-30.
14. “Self-Reliance,” Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 145; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 173; letter to Elizabeth Hoar, September 1847, Memoirs, II, 220; “Culture,” Complete Essays, p. 725. My discussion of Emerson here, as elsewhere, centers on the years of Fuller’s life. After her death, his notions of action, the state, and the individual, underwent a series of changes. First, in the fifties, he joined in the widespread opposition in the North to the Fugitive Slave Law and endorsed collective disobedience to the state and heroic action like John Brown’s. Second, he so fiercely supported the North’s prosecution of the Civil War that he argued that government should have “in any crisis of the state, the absolute powers of a dictator,” and found the Lincoln of the Emancipation Proclamation as triumphantly “representative” as he had Brown. Third, joining a number of citizens’ organizations, he proposed one more conservative than them all, a National Academy of Literature and Art, which would compose “a jury to sit upon abnormal anomalous pretensions to genius, such as puzzle the public mind now and then.” (See George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 177-79.) I am less concerned here with his change—with how the pressures of history, of age, of prestige, made him desert his early radical individualism—than with his constancy. Whether contemporary issues engaged him or not, he always identified himself with American destiny so snugly that little in his example or his thought could serve to interrogate that destiny. Thus, even after her death, he could neither have understood nor shared Fuller’s enthusiasm for alternative, non-American, heroism nor her interest in radical reorganization of class and family structure.
15. See William Salomone, “The Nineteenth Century Discovery of Italy: An Essay in American Cultural History,” American Historical Review, LXXIII (June 1968), pp. 1359-91.
16. Memoirs, II, 324; letter to Richard Fuller, February 23, 1849, Houghton MS. In the latter she deprecates Americans’ mistrust of the “too demonstrative, too fiery, too impressionable” Hungarians, Poles, and Italians and scorns their preference for “the loyal, slow moving Germans” and the Russians’ “gentlemanly servility.”
17. At Home and Abroad, pp. 263, 260, 244, 247, 280.
18. Memoirs, II, p. 223. In April 1848, she alluded to this new habit of half-revelation in a letter to a friend: “I love Rome more every hour, but I do not like to write details, or really to let anyone know anything about it. I pretend to, perhaps, but in reality I do not betray the secrets of my love.” (BPL MS).
19. When all the bequests were paid, her share of the estate came to less than a thousand dollars.
20. Detti, p. 315.
21. Memoirs, II, 236-37.
22. It is interesting that Fuller’s assessments of events in Italy and of the failings of Charles Albert were usually consistent with those that Marx and Engels were publishing at the same time in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. (Marx and Engels began in 1851 sending dispatches of their own to the New York Tribune; their first series was on the German revolution and counterrevolution.)
23. May 29, 1848, Houghton MS.
24. In his Life of Horace Greeley (New York: Mason Bros., 1855), James Parton offers an extensive summary of the debate.
25. Memoirs, II, 244, 242-43.
26. August 15 and 18, 1848, Houghton MS.
27. Faith Chipperfield, In Quest of Love (New York: Coward-McCann, 1957), p. 266. Memoirs, II, 298.
28. Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 365. Mazzini felt these measures implied no socialism, as he told Clough (The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, [London: Macmillan, 1869] I, 143). Fuller’s enthusiasm for similar reforms in Paris, described in her 1849 diary, suggests she warmly welcomed them in Rome (Leona Rostenberg, “Margaret Fuller’s Roman Diary,” Journal of Modern History, 12 [1940], 218).
29. Robertson, p. 360.
30. Memoirs, II, 250.
31. Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1903), I, 155.
32. Memoirs, II, 267-68. Mazzini’s extraordinary concern for individuals, even at the height of the siege, is nowhere more plain than in his letter of June 9, 1849, to Fuller begging her to “be woman and forgive” his not writing, explaining that every minute problem of the war “comes down to me,” and exclaiming in final proof, “I scarcely even write a few words to my mother” (Deiss, p. 259).
33. Detti, pp. 343-44.
34. Deiss, p. 276; At Home and Abroad, p. 418.
35. BPL MS copy, no date.
36. Memoirs, II, 316-17.
37. February 24, 1850, Samuel Gray Ward Papers, Houghton.
38. Why Fuller did not resume writing for the Tribune is unclear; Deiss (pp. 302–03) speculates that it was because rumors of her “free love” liaison were afloat in New York.
39. March 18, 1849, Samuel Gray Ward Papers, Houghton; letter to Emelyn Story, November 30, 1849, Houghton MS copy.
40. Bremer, The Homes of the New World (1853; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968) I, 710; Houghton MS. In her Life of Margaret Fuller (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1942), Madeleine Stern offers the most persuasive argument that Fuller and Ossoli were married. Because there are no records of a marriage in Rome (in the Vatican Library, the Protestant Archives, or the Vicariate of Rome), because they were often in spring 1848 on day trips outside Rome, and because in April 1849 each writes the other lamenting that they cannot be together on April 4, suggesting it is an important anniversary (VI:40) Stern believes they were married on April 4, 1848, in a town outside Rome. She does not address the problems they would have had in paying to keep quiet such a sensational union taking place anywhere in the Papal States. If they were married in remote Rieti, the records were destroyed in an American air raid in 1943.
Detti and Deiss are both more influenced by a letter Ossoli’s sister Angela wrote Ellen Channing on March 9, 1851, saying that her brother had written from Florence that he and Fuller were married there after baptizing their son in Rieti (Houghton MS). But while Detti hypothesizes the marriage took place in an unrecorded visit to Florence immediately after Angelo’s baptism in 1848, Deiss assumes that it took place after they moved to Florence in fall 1849. The chapel Deiss alludes to as a possible scene of the marriage (p. 292) matches the description by Fuller’s friend Hurlbut (Memoirs, II, 321-22) of a convent church, San Salvatore al Monte, near San Miniato; at that time, according to Enzo Settesoldi of the Opera de! Duomo Archives in Florence, no marriage could be performed there.
The marriage question remains wide open. Although for their marriage to be legal and their child legitimate in Italy, they would have had to be married according to canonical law and the Council of Trent, it is possible that they were married by an American official or a Protestant minister. The fact that Ossoli drew up a document making Angelo his heir and entitling him to all rights and privileges of the Ossoli name may be interpreted variously: 1) they were not married when Angelo was born; 2) Ossoli was compensating for having married outside the church; 3) a Catholic marriage had to be kept secret.
41. Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F. G. Kenyon (New York: Macmillan, 1898), I. 428; John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870; rpt. New York: Hillary House, 1961), p. 460.
42. March 5, 1850, Houghton MS.
43. Although both the Springs insisted their advice was based on the greater advantage she would have in publishing her book from Italy than at home, it is not difficult to read between the lines their incapacity to face the shock of her union with Ossoli. Thus Rebecca adds, “if you return you will lose the power to write as well for you would not be so happy and your friend [though canceled by a later pen, this indiscreet last word is still legible] (whom with much pleasure we now learn from Hicks is your old friend Giovanni) would not and could not be so happy here as in his own beautiful Italy—what could repay him, and what could with you take the place of such [illegible] as the Brownings and others you mention? . . . It is because we love you we say stay!” (April 14, 1850, Houghton MS).
44. August 22, 1853, Houghton MS; April, 1883, BPL MS.
45. There is some debate about when the ship sank, the captain’s widow indicating it was five hours earlier (At Home and Abroad, p. 45). Upon hearing news of the wreck, Emerson immediately dispatched Thoreau to the site of the wreck to obtain all the details he could and to retrieve the manuscript, if possible. He failed to find it, but among the Fuller Papers at Harvard is a document ignored by all her biographers which maintains that the bodies of Fuller and Ossoli were washed up on shore some days later. Writing on June 29, 1901, to Mrs. Anna Parker Pruyn, Arthur Dominy maintains that his father, Felix, agent of Underwriters of New York City and correspondent for the New York Tribune, said that the bodies, matching the descriptions of Ossoli and Fuller (all the other women’s bodies had been accounted for), were boxed and sent by a vessel commanded by Captain James Wick to Greeley, who “refused to have anything to do with them.” Fearful he was breaking the law by having the bodies on board, the captain and another man buried them in the dead of night on Coney Island. Later he said he was sure he could not again find the spot, as the night was so dark and his terror so great.
46. Although according to the Memoirs Fuller and Ossoli were torn off the deck at the same instant, two accounts written at the time of the wreck say Ossoli went first (At Home and Abroad, pp. 446, 451). In one of these Fuller refused to try to save herself; in the other the seamen “had just persuaded her to trust herself to a plank, in the belief that Ossoli and their child had already started for the shore, when just as she was stepping down, a great wave broke over the vessel and swept her into the boiling deep” (pp. 450-51). So many people had the impression that Fuller wished to die that when Higginson was writing his biography of Fuller a number of her friends pressed him to strive to eradicate it. It is impossible to know whether or not at the end she chose to die, but if she made that choice under such circumstances, it need not be taken to reflect back on her recent life. More interesting and subtler is the question of whether or not she had already given up, as Margaret Allen argues in “The Political and Social Criticism of Margaret Fuller,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 72 [Autumn 1973]. 560-73). Allen believes that “the triumph of reaction, tyranny, and naked force,” crushed Fuller’s spirit, for she hears in Fuller’s “political reactions during the later years of her life . . . . a prominent note of perfectionist absolutism that yearns for complete solutions and scorns the half measures of politicians. It seems a quintessentially American trait.” Hence, according to Allen, Fuller could take refuge neither in cynicism nor the tragic sense. Putting aside the question how either tragic vision or cynicism might have helped her radical activism survive, the charge of perfectionist absolutism is one Fuller’s late writing sometimes bears out. It is my view, however, that her openness and sensitivity to the actual complexity of experience was never so great as in the last year of her life. After the fall of Rome, the most devastating of her losses, she was indeed emotionally exhausted and longed for a quiet life and occasionally for death. But then her celebration of the Italians’ resistance to the French, her desire to visit and analyze their fortifications, her intensive study of the revolutionary wave, and her continued curiosity about new social experiments are all incompatible with the sort of mental surrender Allen alludes to. What might have produced a fatal despair off the coast of Fire Island was the prospect of trying to hoard and use this slender store of hard-sought resiliency in a country so marked by “perfectionist absolutism.”
47. At Home and Abroad, p. 446.
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