Margaret Fuller's Conversational Journalism: New York, London, Rome

When margaret fuller left New York for Europe in August of 1846, many of her contemporaries assumed that she had abandoned American life permanently and that her dispatches from London, Paris, and revolutionary Rome signaled her turn away from a national agenda in literature and criticism. The fact that Fuller herself never returned to American shores has led scholars to conclude that the body of her journalistic work overseas, like her physical body, could not be "repatriated" (Chevigny, "To the Edges" 173). In this essay, I contend that Fuller's continuous participation in the work of making American culture at home and abroad made her a writer at once emphatically national and deliberately transnational. By practicing a form of journalism that she described as "conversational," she modeled for her readers the kind of creative transnational exchange that she believed could strengthen American democracy. The very criteria that have been used since the 1840s to exclude Fuller from the American literary canon—her commitment to foreign literatures, her belief in the moral value of a cosmopolitan viewpoint, and her faith in journalism as a means to reach the entire nation at once—argue most strongly for her reinscription into a recognizably American tradition of internationalist thought.

In his attempt to exorcise the "Margaret-ghost" that haunted him throughout his career, Henry James assessed Fuller's credentials as a cosmopolitan figure fit to inhabit one of his transatlantic novels. With finely tuned historical condescension, James reflects, "we ask ourselves how, possibly, in our own luminous age, she would have affected us on the stage of the 'world,' or as a candidate, if so we may put it, for the cosmopolite crown" (1:127–28). James implies that Fuller is not cosmopolitan enough; despite "her genius for conversation," she risks being "a formidable bore" along the lines of his bumbling journalist Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady. James may not have been convinced of Fuller's cultural sophistication, but her cosmopolitanism in fact ran in a deeper and more philosophical vein than his own. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an ally closer in time and space to Fuller, introduced her to Thomas Carlyle as "our citizen of the world by quite special diploma" (Emerson, Correspondence 407). His words identify Fuller with the Stoic ideal of the kosmou politês, or "world citizen," a person who values his or her allegiance to a global human community above ties to a particular locality (Nussbaum 7). By focusing on the political implications of Fuller's cosmopolitanism, Emerson places her in the company of thinkers who use larger categories of judgment than those limited to a geographical territory or a local government.

Emerson's letter to Carlyle recognizes the provocatively worldly nature of Fuller's relationship to American national culture at mid-century. Although problematic for many of her peers and even more so for staunchly nationalist critics such as Perry Miller, who wrote Fuller off "as an eccentric, as no true voice of American civilization" (Margaret Fuller xii), Fuller's global consciousness has been a matter of increasing interest to scholars of a more transnational bent.¹ Investigations that have focused primarily on Fuller's cosmopolitan interests as an editor and translator have failed to account for the explicitly political agenda that motivated her journalistic work for the New-York Tribune or for the roots of that writing in one of her earliest professional endeavors: her series of "Conversations" for a group of educated Boston women that included the Peabody sisters and Caroline Healey Dall. Drawing the United States into "conversation" with other countries meant more to Fuller than simply promoting the reading of foreign authors. It meant goading her readers to transform society on a grand scale through imaginative cooperation with other nations. In her Tribune columns and her later dispatches from Europe, she attempted to exert what Bell Gale Chevigny has called "centrifugal" force on the American mind ("To the Edges" 173). Fuller did so in order to push the nation away from what she felt were faulty behaviors and policies, and to lift it...