Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age

4. Margaret Fuller’s Search for the Maternal

The Life of a Woman In recent years various scholars have lamented the fact that the life of Margaret Fuller continues to attract more attention than her works. Because of this undue focus, they remark, we still lack critical editions of fundamental texts, which circulate in the censored versions edited by her brother Arthur after her death.1 Although this state of affairs is now changing, the number of biographical studies dedicated to Fuller by American scholars is indeed quite large. Christina Zwarg, in her Feminist Conversations (1995), convincingly argues that this emphasis on the woman rather than the writer has produced damaging misinterpretations of her work. But, in linking the pathos of Fuller’s life to the neglect of her writing, she seems to place the blame not only on the critics, who are guilty of a biographical approach, but also on Fuller herself, guilty, in turn, for having lived such a romantic life. Zwarg writes, “The dramatic text of Fuller’s life has always generated reader interest; new biographies have appeared with rhythmic regularity since her death in a shipwreck in 1850. But because her provocative personal narrative, with its 66 4 Margaret Fuller’s Search for the Maternal   The other day, I met a decrepit old man of seventy, on a journey, who challenged the stage-company to guess where he was going. They guessed aright, “To see your mother.” Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century cosmopolitan scale and power, has remained the central focus of scholarly attention, the bulk of her writing continues to remain veiled in mystery or misreading.”2 Not only have Fuller scholars put together a narrative that assigns primacy to life over texts—a major essentialist sin in times that tend to attack the idea that subjects exist outside language—they have also plotted it as an initiation story, in which the heroine becomes a freer, more self-conscious person thanks to her dislocating experience in the Old World. And initiation stories, with their naive reliance on the notion that an integral self can be achieved, do not fare well today. Fuller’s European experience is read by a majority of scholars as representing a strong break with her original formation. In their eyes it constitutes the beginning of a process of evolution and self-awareness at both the ideological and literary levels. The problem with this hypothesis, Zwarg maintains, is that it encourages us to neglect all of Fuller’s works prior to her travels in Europe. If they are read at all, it is in order to confirm her former ideological dependence on the Transcendentalists.3 The critical paradox of an approach founded on biography and structured around the idea of a progress toward self-awareness, according to Zwarg, is that it results in a sort of interpretive negativity. That is, all of Fuller’s writings prior to her Roman experience are either given short shrift or judged more or less negatively, if not hurriedly dismissed. At the same time, a work that does not exist—that mysterious History of the Roman Republic swallowed up by the sea and perhaps, according to the judgment of nay-sayers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, never written— is exalted as the apex of her literary production.4 Her real writing, that which is actually accessible, is often neutralized in order to emphasize “the work that we literally cannot read.”5 Zwarg’s is an interesting version of a new postfeminist tendency in the critical literature dedicated to Fuller that privileges the texts and their rhetorical structures over the events of her life.6 Despite the recent revival of attention on her, Fuller continues to be placed at the margins of the nation’s nineteenth-century literary panorama, and is still considered of interest mainly to feminists, as a champion of women’s rights, or to historians, for her connections with the Transcendentalist network. New emphasis on Fuller’s writing rather than on her biography will produce significant changes in the breadth and depth of studies dedicated to her and this will surely be welcomed. I have the impression, however, that the opposition fact-fiction that Zwarg’s approach more or Margaret Fuller’s Search for the Maternal 67 less explicitly intends to deconstruct ends up unchanged, despite the shift of emphasis from the real events of Fuller’s life to the rhetorical strategies of her self-fashioning. Although she argues against the...