“Had I only come ten years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the right soil,” Margaret Fuller wrote to Emerson, from Italy. She went first to England and Scotland, with letters from Emerson to Carlyle and others; useful, but she was herself known. Woman had been published in England, The Dial was admired, and her reviews in the Tribune—along with the fact that she was, in the same journal, to support herself abroad by interviews with “personalities” and descriptions of the scene—did not hinder any more then than now.
She met everyone, even the aged Wordsworth at Grasmere and De Quincey, and picked up gossip. “It seems the cause of Coleridge’s separation from his family was wholly with himself; because his opium and his indolence prevented his making any exertions to support them.”
The most important meetings of her later life were with two vivid, spectacular, radical intellectuals: Giuseppe Mazzini, fabulous throughout Europe, and Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish poet and patriot. And another meeting with a young Italian, the Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, by whom she had, at the age of thirty-eight, a son out of wedlock and whom she later married or did not marry.
Most of the admiring commentaries on Margaret Fuller are eager for her to “find herself as a woman” and also to become a radical in social reform. It is not possible to know if she found herself as a woman, but she did love and was loved by Ossoli, although she was careful not to claim apotheosis.
She became a radical by way of her passionate response to the European upheavals of 1848. (Emerson was in Europe in 1848, and she wrote him from Rome: “Why did you not try to be in Paris at the opening of the Assembly? There were elements worth scanning.”) There was social reform and then some around Concord, but as an aesthete she was bored by Brook Farm, and the Boston Abolitionists were “so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone.” Her thoughts about political agitation changed when she began to connect the antislavery movement with the liberation of Italy, for which she hoped in her Tribune dispatches to arouse American sympathies.
It was at the Carlyles’ that she met Mazzini.[2] He was in exile, raising money for Italian refugees, planning a campaign of return, writing in all the leading English journals not only on politics but on art and literature, and charming almost everyone in the nation with his great personal beauty and the purity of his idealism and self-sacrifice. “The most beautiful man I ever saw,” was the comment of men and women alike. The cause of Italian liberation and the character of Mazzini, and later that of Garibaldi, electrified the English literary imagination and found its way into countless poems, novels, and plays. In 1879, almost thirty years after Margaret Fuller’s death, there appeared an imaginary
conversation in verse, written by the radical journalist W. J. Linton. The title was “Mazzini and the Countess Ossoli.” At the end of this curious bit of versifying, Mazzini has left the stage and “the Countess, alone, prays for him.”
The friendship with Mazzini was genuine in England and grew even closer in Rome. They held many important things in common, Mazzini wrote to his mother, whom Margaret Fuller visited when her boat landed in Genoa. Before leaving England for Paris, there had been a plan to smuggle Mazzini into Italy in disguise and with a false American passport. More than one thing went wrong and just as well.
In Paris, Fuller met Mickiewicz at George Sand’s apartment. Their encounter, he said, was one which “consoles and fortifies.” She was “a true person” and “the only woman to whom it has been given to touch what is decisive in the present world and to have a presentiment of the world of the future.”
Mickiewicz was a bohemian, more forthright and intimately observing than the spiritual Mazzini. To Fuller, he suggested, and apparently without any wishes of his own, that the first step in her deliverance “is to know whether you are permitted to remain a virgin.”
When Mickiewicz came to Rome to recruit among the Poles living in exile, he stayed in her lodgings, and when she was suffering from illness brought on by her pregnancy, he was the first to be told the secret. “You are frightened at a very natural, very common ailment, and you exaggerate it in an extravagant manner,” he told her. Mickiewicz was to be the child’s godfather, but he was not about when Ossoli, determined upon the baptism both for his Catholicism and to legitimate the child, proceeded with the certification.
Fuller and Ossoli met in Saint Peter’s Church, after an Easter service. Somehow, Fuller became separated from her companions, and while wandering about the church was asked by a young Italian if he could be of help. They walked back across the Tiber to the Corso. So, Mickiewicz said when he was told, it was at last to be, “un petit Italien, dans l’église.”
Ossoli was twenty-seven, ten years younger. His mother died when he was a boy, and he lived in the family palazzo with his older brothers and sisters and their ailing father, whom he was taking care of. Later, much about Ossoli was obscured or questioned, either by malice, the secrecy of his connection with Margaret Fuller, or by his reserve and scant English. What seems to be true is that he was from an old family long attached to the Papacy, not rich, and certainly conventional in thought. His father and one older brother were high papal functionaries; two other brothers were in the Pope’s Guardia Nobile. It seems, although it is disputed, that he had Republican sympathies before meeting Margaret Fuller, rather than that she swayed him in that direction. In any case, he joined the Civil Guard, put himself in much danger, and with the fall of the Republic would have had to flee Rome in any case.
The marriage, or the “underplot,” as Henry James called it: soon after their first meeting he proposed marriage, not necessarily legal. Margaret Fuller drew back. “The connection seemed so every way unfit.” Instead, she went off to Florence and Venice as planned, but after a few months she changed her mind and returned to Rome, with almost nothing to live on.
Were they ever actually married? There is confusion here and no sure date or place. The impediments to marriage were many, among them the difficulty of getting a dispensation to marry a Protestant and the confusion of bureaucratic documentation in the city’s chaos. Also, Ossoli did not wish to be disinherited of the little property that was to come to him on his father’s death. (His unfriendly brothers, owing to his Republicanism, managed to disinherit him in any case.) Then there is the question of whether Margaret Fuller cared about marriage vows. William Henry Channing argued that marriage was against her principles. Emerson thought otherwise: “When it came to be a practical question to herself, she would feel that this was a tie that ought to have the solemnist sanction; that against the theorist was a vast public opinion, too vast to brave.” Some evidence can be made to support an actual marriage between the two, but uncertainty remains.
During 1849, Margaret witnessed the flight of the Pope, the announcement of the Constituent Assembly, the declaration of the Republic, and Mazzini’s triumphant entrance into Rome. The happiness did not last long; French troops intervened, and the slaughter of the siege of Rome set in. She herself nursed the wounded, along with one of Europe’s most celebrated beauties, the romantic, radical Princess Belgioiso. Margaret Fuller’s conquest of the “radical chic” figures in Italy—and even of her conservative friend, the important, rich Marchesa Arconati Visconti—seemed to have come about in a natural, unexceptional fashion. She was not seen to be too exalté, aggressive, and learned—after all, they knew their Tasso, Dante, and the divine Raphael also.
There had been a cooling off, a winding down, we imagine, achieved by the surrounding acceptance of herself, her learning, her rapturous zeal and gift for friendship. She was as she was, interesting, unique in many ways, and companionable. Only her writing still suffered from orphic diffusion, from a sentimental femininity of accent. “Hard was the heart, stony and seared the eye, that had no tear for that moment.”
Her dispatches to the Tribune, covering all the great events, were written in the first pers
on and were personal in every sense, filled with pleading, and descriptive passages a bit commonplace. There is also concern for the diplomatic and military tangle of alliances and events. Her Republican bias is candid, in a manner that would not be thought suitable today. Indeed, her reports of disillusionment with the waverings of Pope Pius IX outraged the Catholic diocese in New York. Complaints were made, but Greeley published the accounts uncensored.
Toward the end of her stay in Rome, her writing begins to show a greater control and becomes more graceful and useful, with fewer “effects” that stress her own emotions.
I entered the French ground, all hollowed and mapped like a honeycomb. A pair of skeleton legs protruded from the bank of one barricade; lower, a dog had scratched away its light covering from the body of a man, and discovered it lying face upward all dressed; the dog stood gazing on it with an air of stupid amazement.
By the end of June, the Republic had fallen to the French troops, and the losers were fleeing. The Ossoli family left for Florence and the following summer embarked for America. The last years of Margaret Fuller’s life had been horrible: poverty, overwork, illness; her son nearly starved to death in the town of Rieti where she had left him with a wet nurse in order to return to Rome to make her living.
All the while, she had been preserving documents, taking notes, in addition to her dispatches, for a work to be called “History of the Italian Revolution.” The loss of the book has been lamented. She had made inquiries about the possibility of publication in England, which were refused. Part of her reason for returning to America was that she thought it would help in making the arrangements for publication.
She asked Emerson’s advice, and the answer shows that he was well aware of her “situation” with a husband, perhaps, and a little boy, certainly. Her family and various others had been informed. (Earlier, when she was awaiting the birth of the child, she received a letter from Emerson, in Paris at the time, quite sweetly urging her to come home with him, where he said he would find a pleasant little house for her.) But now the possibility of the return of the irregular family was not so agreeable to imagine. He advised that Italy was an important advantage to her work. “It is certainly an unexpected side for me to support—the advantage of your absenteeism.”
However, return she did, even if in a spirit of gloom about her reception, her devastating poverty, Ossoli’s poor prospects, her ill health and exhaustion. They could not afford a steamer and took a merchant boat, a voyage of over two months. She packed all her documents, her notes, and the letters between herself and Ossoli, as well as others. The manuscript for the book was stored in another box.
The journey was a disaster from the start. The captain took sick of smallpox and died; the child contracted the disease but lived. The ship went on, reaching New Jersey for a landing in New York the following day. Trunks were brought from the hold, the child dressed in his best, America to be faced. A fierce storm came up in the night and the ship began to go down off Fire Island. It started to sink near enough to the shore for some of the passengers to make land by the use of a plank; some drowned in a like attempt. A steward tried to take the child to shore but was swamped by a wave. Margaret Fuller was last seen in a white nightgown, holding the broken mast. The body of the child was recovered and claimed by the Fuller family. The box of letters and other personal documents survived, but the manuscript box was lost. The bodies of Margaret Fuller and Ossoli were not recovered. Bell Chevigny came upon a note in the Harvard Library that indicated that the bodies were indeed found, put in coffins, and shipped to Greeley, who refused to take any kind of action. The captain of the boat in this account worried about his jurisdiction in the matter and buried the bodies at night on Coney Island.
“I have lost in her my audience,” Emerson said. Thoreau, not the dearest of her friends, paid her the finest tribune—a journey to Fire Island to look for the remains. Margaret Fuller was forty years old when she died.
EPILOGUE: PERFIDIOUS HAWTHORNE
The background is rather sketchy, although Hawthorne’s dislike is not surprising. An early entry in his journal: “I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft’s yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do, for which I was very grateful.”
Two years later, a more pastoral entry:
After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson’s I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading. . . . She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to the theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering its sacred precincts.
Perhaps a bit of irony in the final clause.
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, the placid, settled wife of the disturbed, settled Hawthorne, on “The Great Lawsuit”:
What do you think of the speech Queen Margaret Fuller has made from the throne? It seems to me that if she were married truly, she would no longer be puzzled about the rights of women. This is the revelation of woman’s true destiny and place, which can never be imagined by those who do not experience the relation.
No doubt Hawthorne would have expressed it differently, as men and women married to those not concerned with the refinements of writing have good reason to know.
Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, in which the principal character, Zenobia, is often identified with Margaret Fuller, appeared in 1852, two years after her death. The death was a profound shock to the New England countryside, with the grieving family and old friends caught up in the tragedy and faced with the sharp conundrum of the life. While Hawthorne was writing The Blithedale Romance, the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, with an account of the history of the family and personal essays by Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and W. H. Channing, was being composed and arranged. Both books appeared in the same year.
The “striking” remarks by Emerson do not altogether reveal his own and the others’ great swell of reverence for their departed friend. The memorial volume edited, omitted, and even destroyed with a free hand; it also wished to assure that the object of veneration was safely married at the time of the conception of the child. Later scholars have been quick to point out the moral scrubbing of documents and to see the volume as a reduction of the vitality of the subject. Still, Memoirs, containing many letters and reminiscences of encounters among the group, is extraordinarily interesting and moving; it is possible to view it as the true salvaging of Margaret Fuller’s life and thought, which otherwise might have been greatly shadowed in American literary history.
The setting of The Blithedale Romance is, as Hawthorne said, “based on my experiences and observations at Brook Farm,” the hopeful and not quite practical socialist community established in Roxbury, outside Boston. Hawthorne also insists that the characters are fictional. Nevertheless, Zenobia, “the high spirited Woman, bruising herself against the narrow limitations of her sex,” was thought by contemporaries to be a reflection of Margaret Fuller.
There are elements that correspond, but Hawthorne knew as a novelist that he could not have as the central figure a heroine he saw as wholly unappetizing. Had he drawn Margaret Fuller as he saw her, the results are not pleasing to anticipate, but the novel would have been less foolish, as in many ways it is; it might have been a strange modern fiction.
Zenobia is a great and riveting beauty; she is rich, with a mysterious past. She is a performer and a sort of writer with a “magazine signature.” She is a feminist who “scorns the petty restraints that take the life and color out of other women’s conversations.” Zenobia, pretentious, nevertheless has no real culture, “her mind is full of weeds,” which Hawthorne may have believed about Margaret Fuller, even though her culture was greater than his and greater than he needed.
In the book, the narrator, close to Hawthorne himself, has a sudden intuition about Zenobia. He divines, by som
e special mannish knowledge: “Zenobia is a wife! Zenobia has lived and loved!” The revelations about Margaret Fuller were distressing not only to the morals but to the vanity of the Concord circle. She was an “adulteress” and, if married at all, the wife of a titled foreigner, all rather exotic and superior. The Scarlet Letter was begun the year of the death off Fire Island. No just connection can be made but in practical reality Margaret Fuller was the big A in the experience of the countryside. In The Blithedale Romance, it may be noted that Zenobia, in a gruesome description, drowns herself because of love for an unworthy man.
In 1858, Hawthorne made his own Italian journey, and one of the things he did was to run down, like a detective, the Margaret Fuller and Ossoli affair. Hawthorne left in his notebooks an account of a conversation with Joseph Mozier, an Ohio merchant who had gone to Florence to become a sculptor and who had known Fuller. These strange unearthings, violent and above all relishing in tone, are contradictory to the facts and to the moral and emotional remembrances of Margaret Fuller in Italy and at home.
Hawthorne is concerned to remove the title “Marchese” from Ossoli and, if he cannot quite do that, to reduce him to a boy picked up on the street, an idiot, and to see Margaret Fuller as a sort of desperate procuress. His recording of his conversations with Mozier reflects as much his own feeling as that of one who had known Margaret Fuller in Italy.
Mozier . . . then passed to Margaret Fuller, whom he knew well. His developments about poor Margaret were very curious. He says that Ossoli’s family, though technically noble, is of no rank whatever; his elder brother, with the title of Marquis, being at the time a working bricklayer, and the sisters walking the streets without bonnets—that is, being in the station of peasant girls. . . . Ossoli, himself, to the best of his [Mozier’s] belief, was Margaret’s servant, or had something to do with the care of her apartments. He was the handsomest man Mozier ever saw, but entirely ignorant even of his own language, scarcely able to read at all, destitute of manners; in short, half an idiot, and without any pretensions to be a gentleman. . . . As for her towards him, I do not understand what feeling there could have been, except it was purely sexual; as for him towards her, there could hardly have been even this, for she had not the charm of womanhood. . . . She had a strong and coarse nature, too, which she had done her utmost to refine with infinite pains, but which of course could only be superficially changed. . . . Margaret has not left in the minds of those who knew her any deep witness to her integrity and purity. She was a great humbug; of course with much talent, and much moral reality, or else she could not have been such a great humbug.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 45