Discussions

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we pray— that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond- man’s two hun- dred and Sfty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righ teous altogether.”3

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with Srmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to Snish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan— to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

1865

3. Psalm 19.9.

M ARGARET FULLER 1810–1850

In their six- volume History of Woman Suffrage (1881), the U.S. feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage declared that Marga- ret Fuller “possessed more in^uence upon the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time.” When she died tragically at the age of forty, she had published approximately three hundred essays and reviews— emerging as one of the best literary critics of her day— as well as a major travel narrative, an impor- tant book on women’s rights that predated the Srst women’s suffrage convention by several years, and a collection of her writings. She had also edited the Dial (the semi- ofScial journal of the Transcendentalists) and become one of the Srst female columnists and the Srst female overseas journalist for a U.S. daily newspaper, Hor- ace Greeley’s New York Tribune. She not only argued for the intellectual equality of women to men but, in her writings and personal life, presented herself as an exam- ple of women’s abilities. At a time when no institutions of higher learning were open to women, her richly allusive writings displayed a knowledge of literary tradi- tions, history, religion, and po liti cal and legal thought that one would associate with a university- educated scholar or teacher; and at a time when women were expected to remain within the domestic sphere— and never under any circum- stances to compete with men— her activist public presence and conSdent persona troubled and fascinated her male friends. In^uenced by Emerson’s philosophy of self- culture and self- reliance, which she extended to women, Fuller continually challenged herself to move in new directions.

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge), Mas- sachusetts, on May 23, 1810, the Srst of the nine children of Margarett Crane and Timothy Fuller. Her father, a lawyer and four- term congressman, supervised her edu- cation, teaching her Latin, Greek, French, and Italian in a rigorous regime involving

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long hours of study and drill. In an autobiographical account written when she was thirty years old, Fuller complained of the nightmares and headaches that accompa- nied what she termed her “unnatural” childhood; but a few years later, in “The Great Lawsuit” (1843), she praised the father of “Miranda” (Fuller’s Sctionalized self- portrait in the essay) for regarding her “as a living mind” and thus freeing her from the culture’s strictures against developing female intellect. By the time she was ten, she had read extensively in Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus, Shakespeare, and numerous other classic writers. In 1824, her parents sent her to Miss Susan Prescott’s Young Ladies’ Seminary in Groton, Massachusetts, a sort of Snishing school, which she left after a year, returning to live with her family in Cambridge. During the late 1820s she began to read such in^uential Eu ro pe an Romantics as the French novelist and po liti cal theorist Germaine de Staël and the German novelist, dramatist, and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Timothy Fuller moved the family to a farm in Groton in 1833, thus removing Margaret from the Cambridge environment she had come to Snd so stimulating. She continued with her self- education, however, translating Goethe’s drama Torquato Tasso and publishing her Srst essay, “In Defense of Brutus,” in an 1834 issue of the Boston Daily Advertiser & Patriot.

Fuller wanted to become a full- time writer and translator— activities then open- ing up to women— but those plans had to be abandoned when her father died of cholera in October 1835. Her mother was sickly, and the bulk of the responsibility for Snancially supporting the family fell to Fuller. Setting aside her own ambi- tions, she turned to teaching, Srst at Bronson Alcott’s progressive co- educational Temple School in Boston, and then at the prestigious Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island. In her little spare time, she continued her writing and translating, placing several reviews and essays in the Western Messenger, and pub- lishing a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe in 1839. Realizing that she would not be able to devote herself to her literary interests while holding a full- time teaching job, she resigned from Greene Street School in 1839 and moved back to Cambridge. To support herself, she established her “Conversations”— paid seminars for elite women of the Boston and Cambridge area in which dia- logue, rather than rote learning or lecture, was the dominant pedagogy. These meetings anticipated the women’s book- club movement of later in the century and were fondly remembered for years afterward by their participants. Over the next six years the group addressed such top- ics as Greek mythology, the Sne arts, ethics, education, demonology, philo- sophical idealism, and the intellectual potential of women.

A friend of Emerson’s since she Srst sought him out in 1836, Fuller edited the Dial from its founding in 1840 to 1842, while continuing to translate works by and about Goethe. In 1842 she resigned her editorship but kept on with her “Conversations” and writing. She did her Srst signiScant traveling in  1843, spending four months with friends touring the Great Lakes, Illi- nois, and the Wisconsin Territory. Upon her return, she researched the history of the old Northwest territories, wrote over thirty poems, and in 1844 brought out her Srst full- length book, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, a volume

Margaret Fuller, from a daguerreotype made in July 1846. This is the only known photograph of Fuller.

of historical meditations, poetry, and travel narrative, which Edgar Allan Poe hailed as “remarkable.” The New York editor Horace Greeley was so impressed with the book that he offered Fuller the position of full- time literary editor of the New York Tribune.

Fuller moved to New York City in late 1844, and during the next two years pub- lished over two hundred essays in the Tribune, including in^uential reviews of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Frederick Douglass. (She republished a number of these reviews in her 1846 Papers on Literature and Art.) She also wrote columns on public questions— what we would now call investigative reporting— addressing such matters as the condition of the female prisoners she had visited in New York’s Sing Sing Prison in late 1844. In 1845 Greeley published her Woman in the Nine- teenth Century, which expanded her 1843 Dial essay “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” into a full- length book. Taken together, the essay and book meditate powerfully on the ways that cultural constructions of gender limited both female and male potential. Providing examples of strong hero- ines and goddesses from history, literature, and mythology, she sought to inspire women readers to imagine greater possibilities for themselves. She also linked the situation of white domestic women to the situation of the slave, thus developing an overlapping critique of slavery and patriarchy. Lydia Maria Child declared in an 1845 review of Woman in the Nineteenth Century that Fuller raised important questions about whether under current conditions love is “a mockery, and mar- riage a sham.” By the late nineteenth century both the book and “The Great Law- suit” had emerged as landmarks in the history of feminist thought in the United States.

In August 1846, Fuller sailed for Eu rope, having arranged with Greeley to send back regular dispatches at the rate of ten dollars per column. Arriving Srst in En gland, she met the writer and phi los o pher Thomas Carlyle, whom she had long admired but who disappointed her by his reactionary po liti cal views and his cold response to the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, then a po liti cal refugee in En gland. In Paris she met the French woman novelist George Sand and the exiled Polish poet and revolutionary Adam Mickiewicz. She next went to Italy, at the time not a uniSed country but a collection of states— some in de pen dent, some controlled by the pope, and some controlled by Austria. Soon after settling in Rome she became romantically involved with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a nobleman eleven years her ju nior who supported the revolutionary cause of Italian uniScation (Risorgimento) led by Giuseppe Garibaldi and Mazzini. Her dispatches to the Tribune recorded her increasing preoccupation with the developing Italian revolution, which she linked to American ideals of republicanism that harked back to the original Roman repub- lic, long her po liti cal ideal.

In December of 1847 Fuller became pregnant, but as a Protestant her marriage to the Catholic Ossoli seemed out of the question because of the opposition of his family and the difSculties of getting permission in Italy for an interfaith marriage. Through a dismal rainy season, she covered po liti cal events for the Tribune, and when cities of northern Italy revolted against the Austrians in March 1848, Fuller described to her New York readers the joyous response of the Roman citizens. Emerson wrote from En gland urging her to return home before war broke out, but she was not ready to tell her Massachusetts connections about her pregnancy, and chose instead to wait for the child’s birth in the countryside near Rome. Ossoli, who had become a member of the civic guard, was with her when their son, Angelo, was born on September 5. Leaving the baby with a wet nurse— a common practice for the era— Fuller returned to Rome late in November in time to cover the ^ight of the pope and, early in 1849, the arrival of the Italian nationalist Garibaldi, the proclamation of the Roman Republic, and Mazzini’s arrival in Rome as well. The republic lasted less than a year: French troops entered Rome on June 30, 1849, and quickly restored the pope to power. During the bloody siege, Fuller served as the

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1. Reprinted from the Boston Dial (July 1843). In 1845 Fuller published a revised, expanded version of this work under the title Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

director of the Hospital of the Fate Bene Fratelli, doing heroic work for the wounded revolutionaries.

After the defeat of the republican forces, Fuller moved to Florence with Angelo and Ossoli and began to work on a history of the short- lived Roman Republic. She may have married Ossoli, as his sister later claimed and as she herself stated in some of her letters home. But there was doubt about this among her friends, who may have been just as alarmed by her marriage to a Catholic as by what they regarded as her pro^igate sexual behavior as an unmarried woman. Convinced that she and Ossoli would have better economic prospects in the United States, Fuller arranged passage home, and on May 17, 1850, the three sailed for the United States. On July 19, two months and two days later— sailing ships took many weeks to cross the Atlantic— the ship was wrecked within sight of land off Fire Island, New York, and all three per- ished. Angelo’s body washed ashore. A trunk containing some of Fuller’s papers was later recovered, but not her history of Rome. Thoreau traveled to the site and sought vainly for her body; at home, Emerson wrote mournfully in his journal, “I have lost in her my audience.” Hawthorne, who had been friends with Fuller during the 1840s, may have had her in mind when creating Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Wishing to memorialize her career and yet confused about how to present this uncon- ventional woman to a general audience, Fuller’s male friends brought out Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli in 1852, which emphasized her eccentricities, egotism, and aloofness. But if her refusal to stay within feminine bounds disturbed her male con- temporaries, that very nonconformity— an instance of Emerson’s own teachings, after all— had been crucial to her achievements as an intellectual and writer.

The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women1

This great suit has now been carried on through many ages, with various results. The decisions have been numerous, but always followed by appeals to still higher courts. How can it be otherwise, when the law itself is the subject of frequent elucidation, constant revision? Man has, now and then, enjoyed a clear, triumphant hour, when some irresistible conviction warmed and puriSed the atmosphere of his planet. But, presently, he sought repose after his labors, when the crowd of pigmy adversaries bound him in his sleep. Long years of inglorious imprisonment followed, while his enemies reveled in his spoils, and no counsel could be found to plead his cause, in the absence of that all- promising glance, which had, at times, kindled the poetic soul to revelation of his claims, of his rights.

Yet a foundation for the largest claim is now established. It is known that his inheritance consists in no partial sway, no exclusive possession, such as his adversaries desire. For they, not content that the universe is rich, would, each one for himself, appropriate trea sure; but in vain! The many- colored garment, which clothed with honor an elected son, when rent asunder for the many, is a worthless spoil. A band of robbers cannot live princely in the prince’s castle; nor would he, like them, be content with less than all, though he would not, like them, seek it as fuel for riotous enjoyment, but as his principality, to administer and guard for the use of all living things therein.