Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age

9. A Humbug, a Bounder, and a Dabbler: Margaret Fuller, Cristina di Belgioioso, and Christina Casamassima

Even before leaving for Europe Margaret Fuller had already acquired a reputation as a woman and an intellectual with the potential to disturb the entire group of New England scholars and artists who knew her— Henry James Sr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Russell Lowell, among others. What she turned out to be while in Italy, however, upset every American whose opinion mattered during the rest of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century.1 A prime example is Henry James Jr., who could not have known her personally, but who inherited, unchallenged, the views of his masters—and with a vengeance. It is my thesis in this essay that the last stain on a reputation already maimed—due to Fuller’s intelligence, culture, feminist stance, wit, personal choices, and, occasionally, also her arrogance and egotism—came from her association with Princess Cristina di Belgioioso. These two women, similar in age (Belgioioso was born in 1808, Fuller in 1810), met in Rome in late January 1848.2 They may have known each other through Mary Clarke, or Giuseppe Mazzini, or one of the radical intellectuals Fuller had encountered in Milan, or, possibly, 195 9 A Humbug, a Bounder, and a Dabbler Margaret Fuller, Cristina di Belgioioso, and Christina Casamassima   through a very good Italian friend of Fuller’s, Marchioness Costanza Arconati Visconti, although the very pious Visconti did not particularly like “la belle joyeuse”—as Belgioioso had been snidely rebaptized in France—on account of her too audacious behavior.3 Whatever the circumstances of their encounter, Cristina di Belgioioso was sufficiently impressed by Fuller either to remember her or to agree with Mazzini’s perhaps suggesting her, more than a year later, at the end of April 1849, when Belgioioso needed capable women to direct the Roman hospitals during the siege of the city.4 For over a month Belgioioso and Fuller saw each other frequently. When duties ended at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital on the Tiberina Island, Fuller would join Belgioioso either at the nearby Hospital della Trinità dei Pellegrini, where the princess held her headquarters, or at the Quirinale, where they both went to assist the wounded. Numerous similarities connect these two, seemingly different, women.5 Indeed, on account of their many similarities, one would not be surprised if, sometime before she had revealed the existence of her secret family in Italy to her friends and relatives back home, Fuller had confided in Belgioioso. Cristina di Belgioioso was an extremely intelligent and learned woman; and thus, in the very traditional Italian world of her time, she was perhaps even more of an exception than was Fuller in hers. Coming from a noble, wealthy, and politically radical family, the Trivulzios of Milan, she had been well educated and knew Latin and French to perfection ; Fuller also knew these two languages well. And while Belgioioso also acquired English, Fuller learned German and was fairly fluent in Italian.6 Belgioioso was well versed in history, philosophy (she had translated Vico’s Scienza Nuova into French), theology, and politics as, in her own way, was Fuller, who had translated works by and about Goethe and had applied Romantic philosophy to gender and literary questions. Belgioioso was proficient in music and painting, while Fuller was knowledgeable about both. Unlike Fuller, however, Belgioioso possessed some understanding of economics, medicine, and agronomy. While she was in France, the philosopher Victor Cousin had defined Cristina di Belgioioso as “foemina sexu, ingenio vir.” Similarly, Fuller believed that “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” and upheld and chose as a model the sagacious, belligerent, and androgynous Minerva from among the Latin goddesses.7 Fuller had absorbed transcendentalism, whose principles she invoked in attempting 196   to reform American society; Belgioioso knew Fourier’s theories, along the lines of which she organized her large estate at Locate in Lombardy. Well in advance of her time, she instituted a kindergarten and schools for the farmers’ children. She also established laboratories to help talented peasants improve their economic and social status; in the wintertime she even provided large, heated rooms where peasants could gather, take a meal, and warm up. Besides learning, therefore, Belgioioso and Fuller also shared a profound concern for the welfare of people and the amelioration of society. Both Fuller and Belgioioso had fragile physical constitutions. Fuller suffered from migraines and nightmares all her life, and Belgioioso had terrible spells of...