Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

56. Roman Winter

crest appears a gold-crowned black eagle. An eagle to Fuller symbolized freedom —not only America’s but her own—as in the wild eagle she said she had seen flying free and high above the White Mountains on an 1842 trip. Yet the Ossoli family was profoundly Roman Catholic, a people who would never approve of a son and brother living out of wedlock with a free-spirited, middle-class American woman. The Romantic dream of bearing a noble Italian son was wonderful; the reality of being an unwed mother in a conservative world of censuring Catholic fathers, not to mention of unforgiving Puritans back home, was hell.30 Winter set in and the bleak rains began to fall. Fuller, pregnant and alone with her secret except for Ossoli, entered a period more difficult than any since she was a child unloved in a threatening world of forbidding adults. To Emerson on 20 December she wrote: “Nothing less than two or three years, free from care and forced labor, would heal all my hurts, and renew my life-blood at its source. Since Destiny will not grant me that, I hope she will not leave me long in the world, for I am tired of keeping myself up in the water without corks, and without strength to swim. I should like to go to sleep, and be born again into a state where my young life should not be prematurely taxed.” Fuller’s words are reminiscent of the nightmare world that had haunted her sleep in 1842. In that dream she was on a sinking ship but had no energy to swim, and no one came to help her, a dream that evokes images of the near drowning of the Christian knight Huon and pagan princess Rezia in Oberon. Being thrown into the tumultuous sea was the price the lovers paid for having defied Oberon by consummating their relationship before marriage in Rome. In her letter to the fatherly Emerson, Fuller confesses she has had in Italy some “blessed, quiet days,” but now “I must begin to exert myself, for there is this incubus of the future, and none to help me, if I am not prudent to face it.” Fuller laments to the clueless Emerson, “So ridiculous, too, this mortal coil,—such small things!” “And yet,” she might have added, “so final!”31 56SRoman Winter From 16 December 1847 until mid-March 1848 rain fell in torrents, making it seem like night in Fuller’s apartment on a street of high houses that blocked such scant light as might otherwise have crept in through her window; she found she needed to light the lamp when she arose in the morning. In daylight hours, a lethargic Fuller had barely enough energy to make her way through the muddy street and sidewalks of the Corso. She spent hours lying on her sofa and dreaming of riding in a chaise in the hills and fields of New England, though she knew that she could not return in her condition. In her letters and dispatches she explained how, “after a month of continuous rain,” she felt as if “the weight of the world” was pressing her and her high aspirations down to earth, where they then dissolved in the thick mud that lay outside the door to her house.1 Roman Winter 335 336 the rising tide of revolution It was tempting to think of death, as if destiny were drawing her rapidly along the waters of life to “the gate of death” in the way the spirit of death had drawn the poet in his boat in Alastor along tumbling waters to a quiet death in a cradlelike recess atop a precipice that dropped, suddenly, into nothingness. While lying half asleep on her sofa, Fuller had a vision of Richard, she wrote Richard on 1 January 1848, “six or seven years hence” with “honors already gained” and “your true wife at your side, . . . perhaps visiting my grave.”2 Margaret had earlier preached to Richard on his need to be more careful in choosing a mate for life. Now, in light of her own predicament, she began to exhibit a new sensitivity to others’ odd choices and mistakes. “God knows,” she wrote Richard in her 1 January letter, “I have not myself been wise in life.”3 Sadness pervaded her heart whenever she thought of the fate of her siblings. It is as if, she wrote Richard two months later, they are...