Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

48. Entering the European Stage

290 the rising tide of revolution as humanity’s often brutish nature; they also failed to see that the same Romanticism that preaches man is god by his ability to fuse with the almighty One also demands that a person relinquish control of “self” and hence the capacity to make rational decisions and moral choices.22 He or she relinquishes possession of his or her soul. Such a state was anathema to Fuller, who considered soul-possession the privilege of the pilgrim who has completed the journey of life to maturity. Thus for Fuller the idea of soul-possession had a pragmatic American side. Heir to the Puritans and, in her words, “the fathers of the revolution,” men willing to die to secure for themselves the right of self-rule, Fuller when faced with the reality of the Roman Revolution would hold as “her standard,” as Ann Douglas has said, “that set by the American Revolution.”23 The fortuitous intersection of Fuller’s strong American personality with the charismatic personalities of Mickiewicz and Mazzini along with that of the caring yet politically radical Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, as well as with the violent upheaval of the 1848 revolutions, made possible Fuller’s final step forward on her life journey from Tribune reporter to heroine of history. 48SEntering the European Stage Before leaving for Europe on the Cunard steam packet Cambria with her reformminded philanthropist companions, Rebecca and Marcus Spring, Margaret wrote Cary on 20 July 1846 that she went “with a great pain” in her “heart.” Though such pain was “nothing new,” and nothing she could “evade by staying,” seeing Cary before she sailed from Boston on 1 August might help. But if Cary could not come, “know me more than ever yours in love Margaret.” Since she planned only a brief 30 July stopover in Cambridgeport, where her mother was now renting a house, Fuller feared she might similarly not have a chance to say good-bye to Emerson. But Emerson appeared in Cambridgeport with letters of introduction, including one to Thomas Carlyle in which he calls Fuller “an exotic in New England, a foreigner from some more sultry & expansive climate.”1 As a child, Fuller had imagined herself a changeling, a European princess whose real home lay across the sea. This childhood dream was linked in her memory to Ellen Kilshaw, whose return to Liverpool when Fuller was seven had depressed her. After that Margaret had associated her absent friend with a gift Ellen had given her before she left for Liverpool, a bunch of dried golden amaranths from Madeira, a place the child imagined as a “fortunate isle” set “apart in the blue ocean from all of ill or dread.” Whenever Margaret thereafter saw a passing sail, her thoughts returned to Madeira and to the feminine figure for whom she yearned. Ellen’s image merged in memory with an idea of home as a happy place where parents unconditionally loved their children.2 Another draw to Europe was Nathan, whose departure for Europe had similarly upset Fuller. So, too, had her mother’s decision not to visit her a last time in New York before she left the States. Margaret feared her mother might be in Canton on the day of her departure from Boston and that she thus might not see her mother or, for that matter, any of her family again: like her prodigal Uncle Peter, she might not return from her “pilgrimage.” In early June her dark mood had momentarily lifted when she at last received a note from Nathan promising her that either he himself or a letter would greet her in London when she arrived in September. Hope of seeing Nathan again kept her looking forward through the summer of 1846, when continuous rain kept her head hurting.3 Depressed and unwell yet hopeful she might see Nathan in London, Fuller had boarded the Cambria. Though the trip to Liverpool was made in a record ten days, sixteen hours, and the weather and “all circumstances [were] propitious,” the steamer’s constant rocking, combined with “the smell and jar of the machinery,” had made her feel nauseous and her already-aching head throb with pain. She “enjoyed nothing,” she wrote home, “on the sea” and was glad when she saw tall crags, circling seabirds, and then the green fields.4 Arriving on 12 August 1846, Fuller discovered shortly that the land of her childhood fantasies clashed dramatically with the reality of a modern European...