Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller's Writing (review)

Seven years ago, the New England Studies Association devoted its entire annual meeting to a conference on Margaret Fuller's life and writings. The conference at Babson College generated considerable publicity; "Margaret Fuller Gets Her Due" was the title of a lengthy feature article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2 June 1995). In the years that have followed, scholarship on Fuller has continued to develop. In addition to the nearly three dozen articles or chapters in books, Robert Hudspeth's six-volume edition of her letters is now complete (along with a one-volume selected letters); Larry Reynold's Norton Critical Edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century is available for classroom use; Judith Bean and Joel Myerson have edited a complete edition (available on a searchable CD ROM) of Fuller's writings from the New-York Tribune (1844-1846); and, in 2001, the Margaret Fuller Society gained allied organization status with the Modern Language Association. Certainly Margaret Fuller is getting her due. Now, with the publication of Jeffrey Steele's Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller's Writing, we have a fine new critical study that addresses all of Fuller's major texts as well as her poetry, autobiographical fragments, essays, journalism, and many of her letters.

Steele, the author of The Representation of the Self in American Literature (1987) and editor of The Essential Margaret Fuller (1992), has published widely about Fuller's absorption with myth-making and cultural critique. In this new book, Steele provides an analysis of the ideas that shaped Fuller's life and career as a social activist by using three central terms—myth, ideology and mourning—to structure his argument. Steele examines Fuller's assessment of the myths of her culture, the nineteenth-century ideologies of race, gender, and class, and the narratives of mourning that accompany the "sedimented losses" of women and other marginalized members of society (ix). In his introduction, Steele lays the groundwork of his study by outlining Fuller's articulation of the negative effects of "idolatry" and the beginnings of her life-long search for alternative modes of thinking for women. Emphasizing the "coherent personal and political logic" that structured Fuller's work (19), Steele's thesis is that Fuller developed her own theory of self-reliance that depended upon a separatist vision of female power and difference. In the ten chapters that follow, Steele reads Fuller's texts in mostly chronological order, employing a skillful blend of biography and cultural criticism.

Among the best chapters in the book is the first, in which Steele analyzes Fuller's "Autobiographical Romance" in the context of the "Roman character" of her education, the "Roman ideologies" of nineteenth-century America reflected in Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings, and the general fascination with Roman ideas in the early years of the United States. Steele demonstrates that Fuller departed from these ideas to engage in "feminist mythmaking that resulted in the construction of profound symbols of female divinity and power" (25). Steele moves on, in later chapters, to explore the "mystical" essays that Fuller published in The Dial, including the little-studied "The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain," and "Leila," which Steele considers one of Fuller's most important texts. Steele connects the divine feminine ideal that Fuller constructs in this essay with her later works, such as "The Great Lawsuit," Summer on the Lakes and her poetry. The last third of the book is devoted to Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Fuller's years as a writer for the New-York Tribune, both in New York and in Italy. In these chapters, Steele emphasizes Fuller's increasing activism for women and her efforts to substitute female models for the masculine ones of nineteenth-century American culture.

The strengths of this engagingly written and theoretically sophisticated book are many. Steele provides detailed analyses of several...