Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Introduction

[xi] d Introduction S. G. W. says How can you describe a Force? How can you write the life of Margaret? Well, the question itself is some description of her.1 ralph waldo emerson “Margaret Fuller Gets Her Due” proclaimed the headline, written a mere one hundred and forty–five years after her death.2 What happened to Fuller between her death in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, in 1850 and this statement confirming the renaissance of interest in her? How did what Henry James† called the “Margaret–ghost” gain enough substance to enter American literary anthologies? And how did the way she was viewed by her contemporaries affect all of this? In many ways, the answers to these questions may be found in the present book.3 Thomas Carlyle,† none too modest himself, wrote after meeting Fuller: “Such a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul.” A friend, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson,† could say that Fuller “occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME.” Comments like this led people like Oscar Wilde, who never met Fuller, to produce such characterizations as declaring her one “to whom Venus gave everything except beauty, and Pallas everything except wisdom.”4 Fuller’s life is a good place to start in tracing the development of both her personality and the image of her created by others. Her comment to Emerson “Who would be a goody that could be a genius” succinctly states her own feelings about conforming to the mold of conventional womanhood in early nineteenth-century America.5 Her father educated her as if she were The house on Cherry Street, Cambridgeport, where Margaret Fuller was born. Joel Myerson Collection of NineteenthCentury American Literature , used by permission of the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. The Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, where Fuller taught between 1837 and 1838. From Madeleine B. Stern, The Life of Margaret Fuller, 1942. Introduction [xiii] a boy, and at age fifteen she rose before five, then walked an hour and practiced on the piano an hour before eating breakfast, after which she read French and Thomas Brown’s Philosophy. At nine-thirty, she went to school and read Greek until noon, when she went home to recite and practice until dinner at two. Then she read Italian for two hours, walked, played music or sang, and wrote in her journal. This type of education clearly did not fit Fuller for what Barbara Welter has famously called “The Cult of True Womanhood,” with its “four cardinal virtues”: piety, purity, submissiveness , and domesticity.6 Fuller’s piety was based more in German Romanticism than in Puritanism; her interest in purity was more aesthetic than physical; her submissiveness was nonexistent (as she wrote in 1838, “I myself am more divine than any I see”7 ); and she was more at home in a library or a meeting of the Transcendental Club than she was by the hearth of a quiet little cottage. Woman’s sphere may well have been the home, but Fuller considered herself a citizen of the world. In short, Fuller wrote, “I have learned to believe that nothing, no! not perfection, is unattainable.”8 This sense of striving for whatever she wanted came to Fuller early. The way Timothy Fuller educated his daughter meant that when the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, a short distance from Harvard College , she came into contact with the best minds of her generation, and she addressed them as equals, much to their surprise and often their discomfort . She studied German literature in the original with as much enthusiasm and knowledge as any of the men who had actually studied abroad, attempting a biography of Goethe and publishing translations of Eckermann ’s Conversations with Goethe (1839) and Günderode (1842). She attended at least eight meetings of the Transcendental Club, the most famous grouping of the Transcendentalists,9 edited for two years (1840–1842) their journal the Dial,10 moved to New York (1844–1846) to become one of the first women journalists for a national publication when she joined the NewYork Tribune,11 and traveled to Europe, eventually settling in Italy in time to become a participant in the Roman Revolution of 1848.12...