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[175] d [Journal Comments on Fuller in 1858] (1884) Nathaniel Hawthorne Hawthorne’s journal comments on Fuller and her husband, first published in his son Julian’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884), were considered scandalous when they appeared. Not only do they depict Ossoli as an illiterate fool (“her clownish husband”) who could not distinguish between a left and a right foot, they express the worst side of Hawthorne’s feelings about Fuller, from his considering her “a great humbug; of course with much talent, and much moral reality, or else she could not have been so great a humbug,” to his final conclusion that “On the whole, I do not I know but I like her the better for it;—the better, because she proved herself a very woman, after all, and fell as the weakest of her sisters might.” He also reports Mozier’s comment that Fuller’s book on the Roman Revolution had never existed. At least Julian omitted his father’s statement that Fuller’s interest in Ossoli could only be “purely sensual,” which would have further upset contemporary sensibilities and sparked even more debate. Joseph Mozier (1813–1870) was born in Burlington, Vermont, moving on to become a successful merchant in New York. In 1845, he moved to Florence to study sculpture, later establishing a studio in Rome. Known as a neoclassical artist, he produced works based on literature, myth, and generic themes such as “Pocahontas,” “Esther,” “Undine,” “Truth,” and “Silence.” There is no evidence to suggest any rift between him and Fuller; indeed, they seem good friends. She had been nursed by Mozier and his wife, Isabella Hogg Mozier (1818–1889), when she became sick in Florence in 1847, and he had tried unsuccessfully to get her a contract for writing a series of “Letters from Florence” (31 October 1849, Letters, 5:278). When she first met Mozier, Fuller believed him “a man of fortune, who has taken to sculpture from love, and shows promise of much excellence”; later, she commented favorably on Mozier’s sculptures in the New-York Tribune (see Dispatches from Europe, 268). Mozier’s wife was, thought Fuller, “a very good and sweet woman,” and she described Fuller as “a mild saint and ministering angel” (16 October 1847, Letters, 4:300; Capper, Public Years, 408). When finances forced Fuller to accept payment for teaching the Moziers’ child Isabella, she regretted fuller in her own time [176] [Rome, 3 April 1858] . . . From [discussing Horatio] Greenough, Mr. [Joseph] Mozier passed to Margaret Fuller, whom he knew well, she having been an inmate of his during a part of her residence in Italy. His developements about poor Margaret were very curious. He says that Ossoli’s family, though technically noble, is really of no rank whatever; the elder brother, with the title of Marquis, being at this very time a working bricklayer, and the sisters walking the streets without bonnets—that is, being in the station of peasant-girls, or the female populace of Rome. Ossoli himself, to the best of his belief, was Margaret’s servant, or had something to do with the care of her apartments. He was the handsomest man whom Mr. Mozier ever saw, but entirely ignorant even of his own language, scarcely able to read at all, destitute of manners; in short, half an idiot, and without any pretensions to be a gentleman. At Margaret’s request, Mr Mozier had taken him into his studio, with a view to ascertain whether he was capable of instruction in sculpture; but, after four months’ labor, Ossoli produced a thing intended “very much” that she needed to do this in order “to eke out the bread and salt and coffee till April,” because it would be “inadequate compensation” for his “active and steady interest” in her (30 November 1849, Letters, 5:285). Julian’s timing could not have been worse. The previous year Julia Ward Howe had published a favorable biography of Fuller that attempted to give a sense of her personality. When Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Margaret Fuller Ossoli appeared in 1884, it was widely praised for achieving its aim of stressing Fuller’s “vigorous executive side” as an antidote to the Memoirs, which Higginson felt had left Fuller “a little too much in the clouds” (5). The publication of Hawthorne’s remarks eclipsed interest in these two biographies , as such friends of Fuller’s as James Freeman Clarke, Sarah Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch and his wife, Fuller...

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