Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  Maria Child’s revelations had gone still further. She told Mary that “she never saw such a craving for affection as in Margaret” and recounted an incident from their days together as journalists in New York City when Margaret had “burst into tears,” confiding that she “feared she should die” if she never had a child. Astonished that “Margaret, with her vaulting ambition was woman enough to say that,” Mary Peabody, now married to the politician Horace Mann and herself the mother of three young boys, wrote to Sophia that “I do not wonder at her marrying the first man who showed devoted love to her even if he were not particularly intellectual.”

  “How infinitely sad about Margaret,” Sophia wrote back. She too was convinced now that “if her husband was a person so wanting in force & availibility,” Margaret would have found “no other peace or rest” back in America—“I am really glad she died.” Sophia had harsh words for the loose-lipped Maria Child as well: “there is a vein of coarseness in her nature, not feminine. I hate reform-women, as a class do not you? I think it is designed by GOD that woman should always spiritually wear a veil, & not a coat & hat.”

  But Sophia and Mary’s oldest sister, Elizabeth Peabody, still unmarried, reached a kinder appraisal of Margaret, the woman she once helped find her way in Boston’s literary marketplace, and of her unconventional liaison in Rome. “It was not unpleasant to Margaret’s romantic temperament,” Elizabeth supposed, to have had “this little mystery for a season.”

  Sophia Hawthorne’s distaste for “reform-women” signaled a conflict that might have distressed Margaret on her return to America more than any controversy resulting from bringing the diffident, undereducated Giovanni dei Marchesi Ossoli to live with her there. While Margaret was away in Europe, the women’s rights cause she had helped to set in motion with Woman in the Nineteenth Century had surged ahead into activism with a first impromptu convention in Seneca Falls, New York, called by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, once a participant in Margaret’s Boston Conversations. The year was 1848, when revolutions swept the Continent. Had Margaret survived the Atlantic crossing in the summer of 1850, she would have been expected to attend the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, scheduled for October in Worcester, Massachusetts. In later years, the president of the convention, Paulina Wright Davis, an anti-slavery activist turned suffragist, recalled having written to Margaret in May of 1850—a letter Margaret never received—asking her to preside over the two-day assembly. “It can never be known if she would have accepted,” Davis admitted, but “to her, I, at least, had hoped to confide the leadership of this movement.”

  Instead, when delegates from as far away as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and upstate New York gathered in Worcester on October 23 and 24 to hear Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, and William Lloyd Garrison speak in favor of women’s suffrage and a slate of other reforms, the assembled crowd observed a moment of silence. “We were left to mourn her guiding hand—her royal presence,” remembered Davis. But aside from William Channing, who served as one of two vice presidents at the convention, these prominent radicals were not Margaret’s comrades. Waldo Emerson had dodged the event, claiming he was hard at work on Margaret’s memorial biography. Speaking at a convention like this one, with more than a thousand participants, had not so far been Margaret’s way of doing business either.

  Still, Paulina Wright Davis began her keynote address by citing a connection between the women’s rights cause and “the European movement of 1848,” the wave of revolutions that Margaret had so ardently championed and that had seemed, for a short while, certain to succeed. It would not be enough, Davis warned, to “rely upon a good cause and good intentions alone.” A strong organization with clear aims would be necessary. Davis’s language as she continued her speech might have been drawn from one of Margaret’s Tribune columns or Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Davis advocated a “reformation,” both “radical and universal” in nature, that “seeks to replace the worn out with the living and the beautiful.” She envisioned “an epochal movement—the emancipation of a class, the redemption of half the world, and a conforming re-organization of all social, political, and industrial interests and institutions”—a movement for “human rights.”

  The question of Margaret’s reception at her return, which led some of her closest friends to conclude that her death had been merciful, suggested a more troubling one—had she wished to die? Was there more than a tinge of the suicidal in a person who could “refuse” rescue, even for reasons of familial devotion? Anyone who had been close to Margaret knew her occasions of despair, her recurring wish in extremis for release. The question would not go away, thriving in the rich soil of Margaret’s audacious life. To so many, Margaret’s choices had always seemed unthinkable. In her final hours, might she have welcomed a way out?

  As late as 1884, an elderly William Henry Channing was still “pained” by the thought that he might have abetted such speculation with his account of the wreck for the memorial volumes he’d joined Waldo Emerson and James Freeman Clarke in publishing soon after Margaret’s death. There, “our blessed M. appears as almost wilfully . . . throwing away her own life,” Channing wrote regretfully to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, at work on his own biography of Margaret, “out of a resolve not to be sundered from her husband & their boy.” Indeed, after reading Channing’s version of the tragedy in the 1852 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Caroline Healey Dall, the young recorder of Margaret’s Conversations, now unhappily married to a man she considered her intellectual inferior, thought it likely that “Margaret was happy to die,” although for different reasons than Channing expected. Dall believed Margaret must have chosen death “before the mist dissolved”: before she was forced to admit that her “romantic marriage” to Giovanni Ossoli was not a true “union of heart and flesh”—and “mind.”

  But Margaret’s own writings in the last year of her life show persistent resolve in the face of danger, not recklessness or fatalism, and an immunity to public censure. “I have never yet felt afraid when really in the presence of danger,” she had written to her mother of the passage into Rome on flooded roads after Nino’s birth. If Margaret was pregnant again, as rumored, or even if she wasn’t, she was still in love with Giovanni. She believed in the future of their family. Margaret had known, as she’d written to William Channing from Florence on the eve of her return, that “there must be a cloud of false rumors and impressions at first, but you will see when we meet that there was a sufficient reason for all I have done.”

  All that Margaret had done in Italy, all that she had suffered and survived—a lonely birth, months of separation from Giovanni or Nino, the days under siege, Nino’s brushes with death—had prepared her for the final crisis, caught in a “heavy storm” on a homeward journey. Unlike her father, to whom she’d written a first letter of concern for his safety in another violent storm—“i hope you will not have to come home in it”—Margaret, the returning prodigal, was traveling with all that she most prized. In a brave decision worthy of the mythic heroines she took as her guides, Margaret would not leave them behind: “having lived, I shrink not now from death.”

  There could be no burial for Margaret and Giovanni, but within five years of the drownings, her family erected a stone monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Nino’s remains, which had been transferred from Fire Island to Cambridgeport in the days following the wreck, as well as those of Timothy, Julia Adelaide, and Edward, were reinterred in a plot in the lush, gardenlike cemetery large enough to accommodate future generations, so that the Fullers might “mingle our dust together as we have our hearts,” in Margarett Crane’s plan. Margaret’s sister, Ellen Channing, was the first to join them—dead of consumption in 1856.

  In the years after, so many visitors—grieving, curious, inspired—made their way to Margaret’s memorial stone that the route leading directly from the entrance up the hillside to the Fuller plot became a well-worn path and eventually the first
paved road in the cemetery. Despite the reassuring solidity of the granite memorial—to “Margaret Fuller Ossoli” and “her Husband, Giovanni Angelo, Marquis Ossoli,” as the monument read—Margaret could now only ever be “yours in the distance,” as she had once signed a letter to a friend from abroad. Perhaps that is why so many wished to get as close as they could and say goodbye.

  Acknowledgments

  My debts to previous scholars and biographers are legion. One will be immediately apparent to some readers: in homage to Margaret Fuller’s first biographers, her three friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, I have adapted the chiefly geographical section titles from their two-volume Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli for use in my account. These markers served as formal requirements do in a sonnet, permitting me to tell a new story without departing entirely from tradition. Several italicized sentences in Chapter 21 are quoted directly from Memoirs.

  The Emerson-Channing-Clarke volumes kept Margaret Fuller’s memory alive through the second half of the nineteenth century, along with later biographies by Julia Ward Howe and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Although many now credit Woman in the Nineteenth Century with inspiring the American women’s suffrage movement, Margaret Fuller was nearly forgotten by the time of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1920. She enjoyed a brief vogue as a feminist foremother in the 1970s, her face appearing on T-shirts, her famous injunction “Let them be sea-captains!” converted into a slogan. Her resurrection then was aided by the publication of important works by Bell Gale Chevigny and Paula Blanchard, just as Robert Hudspeth and Charles Capper embarked on decades-long efforts to document Fuller’s life, in a six-volume edition of her letters and a two-volume definitive biography, respectively. During the same period, Joel Myerson, Judith Mattson Bean, Susan Belasco Smith, and Larry J. Reynolds issued complete editions of Fuller’s nearly three hundred journalistic pieces written for the New-York Tribune. Joan Von Mehren and Meg McGavran Murray have produced thoroughly researched biographies; and two anthologies, Jeffrey Steele’s The Essential Margaret Fuller and Mary Kelley’s The Portable Margaret Fuller, have made a broad selection of writings accessible to general readers. Joel Myerson’s contributions to Fuller scholarship extend well beyond his editions of her Tribune columns, beginning with his bibliographic work of the 1970s and surely not ending with his recent Fuller in Her Own Time. No new biography can be written without reliance on these crucial projects.

  I am grateful to Phyllis Cole, Helen R. Deese, Kathleen Lawrence, and Robert D. Richardson Jr. for “conversations that make the soul,” whether in person or by email, that have contributed greatly to my understanding of Margaret Fuller and her friends. The members of my biographers’ group, Joyce Antler, Frances Malino, Susan Quinn, Lois Palken Rudnick, Judith Tick, and Roberta Wollons, as well as companions in biography Carol Bundy, Natalie Dykstra, Carla Kaplan, Louise W. Knight, Stacy Schiff, and Susan Ware, have prodded and praised in precisely the right measure. Deborah Friedell first suggested I write about Margaret Fuller, John Demos urged me to tackle a “big” subject, and Lindy Hess and Ann Hulbert believed I could. Deborah Pickman Clifford saw me begin, and I wish she were here to read the final pages.

  Profound thanks to Charles Capper, Robert Hudspeth, Joel Myerson, and Joan Von Mehren, who always answered my questions, and to Lynn Hyde, Mary De Jong, Lucilla Fuller Marvel, Marie Cleary, Elton A. Hall, Alan Thomsen, and James Lawrence, dean of the Swedenborgian School of Studies, all of whom led me to new and fascinating material. Tom Rankin, Mario Bannoni, Wendy White, and Deb Theodore were my guides to Rome. Anne Gray Fischer assisted ably and often on short notice with a variety of research tasks, and Neil Giordano helped with illustrations. The comradeship of the Reverend Jenny Rankin and the Transcendentalist Council of First Parish Concord, as well as the Reverend Dorothy Emerson, Jessica Lipnack, Bonnie Hurd Smith, and others of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee, sustained me in moments when I felt, as Margaret once lamented, “I am little better than an aspiration.”

  The endurance of Margaret Fuller’s legacy depends on the dedicated archivists who care for her private papers and make them available to the public. Leslie Morris, Heather Cole, and the staff of the Houghton Library at Harvard were generous with their time and guidance to the voluminous Margaret Fuller Family Papers. Peter Drummey, Brenda Lawson, Anne Bentley, Kathy Griffin, Conrad E. Wright, Ondine LeBlanc, Katheryn Viens, and Dennis Fiori continue to make the Massachusetts Historical Society my research home. Leslie Perrin Wilson of the Concord Free Public Library shared insights along with the treasures of the William Munroe Special Collections, and Kimberly Reynolds of the Boston Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Division made certain my research missions were successful. Sarah Hutcheon of the Schlesinger Library always had something new to show me, and Karen Kukil of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College introduced me to Caroline Sturgis Tappan’s artwork. Nina Myatt and Scott Sanders, who against all odds maintain the Antiochiana Collection in Yellow Springs, assisted from afar. My research at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library was conducted chiefly on Lola Szladitz’s watch; Isaac Gewirtz offered aid in recent years.

  My work on Margaret Fuller began as a result of a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. I am grateful for the mix of minds in the RIAS class of 2007, particularly for conversations initiated by Jane Kamensky and William McFeely of the Biography Cluster and discussions on historical narrative writing with Katherine Vaz. Drew Gilpin Faust was dean, and her encouragement, as well as that of the Fellowship Program director Judith Vichniac and Nancy Cott, director of the Schlesinger Library, has been crucial. Current dean Lizabeth Cohen and the members of the 40 Concord Group make RIAS a continuing source of intellectual support. My colleagues in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College have abetted my interest in Margaret Fuller and Transcendentalism, especially Yu-jin Chang, who translated several German texts; I am grateful for a semester’s leave during which I completed many chapters of the book, as well as for a Huret Faculty Development Award, which enabled research in Rome.

  My agent, Katinka Matson, made certain this book found a safe home; my editor, Deanne Urmy, provided that home at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as well as judicious advice at every stage of the project. Susanna Brougham, Larry Cooper, Nicole Angeloro, and Ashley Gilliam, also at HMH, offered invaluable assistance; Emily Bailen McKeage and Deborah Weisgall read the manuscript and supplied meaningful criticism and much-needed reassurance. Abundant thanks to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Christine Stansell, Diane McWhorter, Margo Howard, Gail Banks, and Joan Ensor, patient and inspiring friends; more gratitude still to my daughters, Josephine Sedgwick and Sara Sedgwick Brown, for all they teach me every day, and to Scott Harney, first reader and devoted partner.

  Notes

  In quotations from primary sources I have retained the original spelling and punctuation, except in some instances where I have altered capitalization at the start of sentences for ease of reading.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Names

  CS: Caroline Sturgis

  GAO: Giovanni Angelo Ossoli

  JFC: James Freeman Clarke

  MCF: Margarett Crane Fuller

  MF: Margaret Fuller

  RWE: Ralph Waldo Emerson

  TF: Timothy Fuller

  WHC: William Henry Channing

  Books

  CFI: Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 1, The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  CFII: Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 2, The Public Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  Dispatches: Margaret Fuller, “These Sad but Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

  EL: The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in ten volumes: vols. 1–6, Ralph L. Rusk, ed
.; vols. 7­–10, Eleanor M. Tilton, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, 1990–95).

  FL: The Letters of Margaret Fuller, in six volumes, Robert N. Hudspeth, ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983–94).

  JMN: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in sixteen volumes, William H. Gilman et al., eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–82).

  MMM: Meg McGavran Murray, Margaret Fuller: Wandering Pilgrim (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2008).

  OM: Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in two volumes. R. W. Emerson, J. F. Clarke, and W. H. Channing, eds. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1852).

  SOL: Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Susan Belasco Smith, ed. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

  VM: Joan Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

  WNC: Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1845).

  Manuscript Collections