Margaret Fuller - A Retrospective

 

 My introduction to Margaret Fuller came to me in a Research Associates publication bought for me by my parents during a visit to Washington D.C. The gift, The Book of Distinguished American Woman, by Vincent Wilson Jr., for the next few weeks became an absolute bible to an aspiring eight year-old scholar like myself, and there was a time I had committed to memory every likeness on every page, and every date in each of the 24 biographies. 

  If through the lens of the present-day scholarship it may now seem off as a dated relic of the 20th-Century scholarship prioritizing a privileged few "eminent women of history," compiled by a white male historian (case in point, only three women of color are included in the volume: Mary Mcleod Bethune, Ida Wells Barnett, and Bessie Smith), it was an invaluable benchmark for my interest in American history and beyond. I would flip through the leadlet pages to the point where the front cover and binding is now only intact by scraps of scotch tape. 

While many of the subjects were at least vaguely familiar to me already - First Lady Abigail Adams, Helen Keller, Amelia Earhart, Emily Dickinson, Eleanor Roosevelt - there was one entry whose individual likeness left such an impression that I would return to it again and again. This one entry seemed to defy "easy categorization" - Margaret Fuller, or as on her tombstone, Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, who lived from only 1810 to 1850. 

There wasn't anyone quite like her. Her biography intersected with such a variety of different historical topics and concepts that it was difficult to confine her to any one such area. She was the only female contemporary in the Transcendentalist movement to truly equal the great Ralph Waldo Emerson or the rugged individualist Henry David Thoreau. She was an aspiring journalist who penetrated the male dominated New York Tribune, paving the way for trailblazers like Nellie Bly. She was a social theorist who took part in the utopian Brook Farm experiment of the early 1840s. She was a literary critic whose eye for talent correctly assessed that Nathaniel Hawthorne's works would endure, while her biting honesty wryly slapped down the esteemed brahman James Russell Lowell and incensed competitor Edgar Allen Poe. She was a free spirit whose independence took her across the Atlantic to hear Frederic Chopin play and dine with Thomas Carlyle. It was this same spirit that brought her to join the Roman Revolution of 1848, serving as a military hospital nurse before siring a child by an Italian nobleman. And, like Amelia Earhart less than a century later, it was that spirit that same spirit which brought her to attempt one last great voyage before perishing, vanishing without a trace (in this case in a storm off of Fire Island on a boat bound for New York).  

It is perhaps for this reason that Margaret Fuller is not as well known as, say, Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. If the latter two ladies could be conceptualized solely through the lens of the Women's Suffrage Movement, there was no such clarity of vision as to what Margaret Fuller was about. For certain, she was supportive of women's suffrage. Her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, provided the strongest impetus for the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the genesis of the women's movement itself. But if Anthony and Stanton were were about attaining a specific goal, i.e. the vote, there was less of a specificity as to what Fuller wanted or intended. She advocated for the rights of all oppressed peoples - the enslaved African American, the vanishing American Indian tribes of the Midwest, the prostitutes interred at Sing Sing, the mentally ill imprisoned on the notorious Blackwell's Island - but she was not an "activist" in the sense of an Emmeline Pankhurst, throwing bricks and chaining herself to fence posts. If her frustration with her Transcendentalist mentor Emerson was that he was unwilling to translate his ideas into concrete calls for reform, there seemed a similar reluctance on her own part, if perhaps more of a preponderance about how to do so as a woman "in a man's world."

Her genesis as one willing to convert "calls to action" into actual deeds came in the form of her witnessing the Italian Revolution of 1848, which would coincide with her own individual liberation, her sexual liberation, with Count Angelo Ossoli. This, such a radical concept for a Nineteenth-century "woman of eminence," remains such an anomaly that even Vincent Wilson, publishing in the late 1990s, skimmed over it as quickly as possible - "She fell in love with Marchese d'Ossoli and bore him a son. later they married."

There is almost no such equivalent to Margaret's unfortunate experience in 19th-century American letters. It resulted in her almost complete erasure from posterity. The subject of ridicule and gossip, historians and contemporaries were more determined to make an example of her than to commemorate a life of almost unfathomable accomplishment, all before the age of 40.