Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age

1. Getting from Here to There: Margaret Fuller’s American Transnational Odyssey

When I began my own odyssey of writing Margaret Fuller’s life, I knew my guiding historical question would necessarily be: how did a woman, who lived three-quarters of her life in the private sphere relegated to antebellum women, manage in a single decade to fashion herself into her generation’s most famous cosmopolitan intellectual? By this I mean a self-conscious public “thinker” (to use her preferred term) vitally engaged with national discourses outside her native country. A host of modern scholars has provided one answer: she got out of the United States. Their plot of her needed escape varied according to ideological purpose. For the 1920s progressive Vernon Parrington, America’s original sin that Fuller had to elude was its “Puritanism.” For the post– World War II existentialist-minded Perry Miller, it was its innocence. For the 1950s “consensus” historian Stanley Elkins, it was the nation’s “abstract” and dangerous utopianism. For the 1970s Marx-minded feminist scholars Bell Chevigny and Ann Douglas, it was America’s lack of a class-conscious sense of “History.” These teleological narratives also varied in historical plausibility. Perry Miller rounded out his modernist fable by speculating that Fuller, facing an alien nineteenth-century 3 1 Getting from Here to There Margaret Fuller’s American Transnational Odyssey   America, may have in fact “elected” to go down with the sinking ship Elizabeth!1 I do not mean to suggest that it is necessarily wrong to play Fuller against American difference from Europe. Since Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (a work Fuller much admired), the idea of America ’s “exceptional” world status has been probably the most relentlessly played theme in American historical writing. And this is true whether this American “exceptionalism” is regarded (as it often was in the nineteenth century) as real and positive or (as it often has been since) mythic and negative. Moreover, the concept rests on a rock bottom historical reality: in the antebellum era, nationality, along with democracy and Protestant Christianity, did constitute one of the period’s trinity of defining discourses. Finally, the national question clearly shaped Fuller’s life. Certainly it drove the politics of the 1848–49 European revolutions that in her last years she embraced. More important still, her struggles with national self-identity give us—to revert to my opening question— a central key to understanding her identity as a cosmopolitan public intellectual.2 To find this key, though, we need (to revise Thomas Carlyle’s famous sneer) to “accept [her] universe.” By that I mean accept both its national and international halves. If we do this, we can see that American exceptionalism is a profoundly misleading rubric for understanding Fuller’s intellectual career in the United States for the simple reason that these spheres were not successive but intimately entangled. So here I want to propose a counter-exceptionalist narrative. First, Fuller began her intellectual life in a European-centered mode that opened her to the world but led her into a cultural cul-de-sac. Second, she tried to escape this dead end by adapting her deracinated Romantic cosmopolitanism to a series of “transnational” American reform sites that both included and transcended nationality. Third, these moves reached their apogee in New York, where they culminated in a seminal transnational American cultural vision but an uncertain political one. Finally, at the end, I want to briefly indicate how an appreciation of Fuller’s American “transnational odyssey” might inject some fresh thinking into recent calls for an “international” or “transnational” American history. Oscar Wilde says somewhere that Romantics begin at the climax. Fuller’s life plot would seem to bear this out. Instead of beginning (as in a good German bildungsroman) with the narrow world of innocence, her life begins with the intellectual equivalent of a very wide world: Latin 4   grammar at six; most of the classical authors by ten; French, Italian, and Spanish works by twelve; and nearly the entire canon of Renaissance and early modern European literature by nineteen. The question, though, remains: how did such a precociously cosmopolitan regimen produce a questing public intellectual, rather than merely, to rephrase Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous disparagement of un-American scholars , a cosmopolite “bookworm”?3 To foreshorten the answer radically, we need to notice two psychologically resonant ideologies that infiltrated that precocity. One was the Enlightenment-inspired regimen that her scholarly Jeffersonian Republican father established for her...