influential fl a american women w Excerpt say I was surprised, but I was genuinely thrilled by how frequently I found her expressing ideas that sounded so modern: “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” You portray Margaret as rigorous in her thinking about women and social issues, yet often confused in her relationships with friends and mentors. Was she aware of this contradiction? Fuller did have a habit of falling for men, whether as friends or as potential romantic partners, who weren’t nearly as open to the fluidity of gender roles as she was, and she was repeatedly disappointed. But these experiences inspired ever better ideas, and spurred her on to wider realms of experience. If she’d been more satisfi fied by Ralph Waldo Emerson as a friend, she might not have left Boston for New York, where she became a front-page columnist for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, which led to her tour of Europe as a foreign correspondent—a first for women. Margaret took great pleasure in her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century and talked about continually revising it. Did she do this? What is it like to read her words today? It would have been interesting to follow Fuller’s revisions of Woman in the Nineteenth Century over the course of that century, like Walt Whitman’s successive editions of Leaves of Grass. But soon after its publication, she was in Italy espousing another sort of revolution. When my students read the essay on which the book was based, “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men, Woman vs. Women,” they find it lively and relevant. And they’re astonished to learn that she was saying then what still needs to be said now: “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.” Margaret’s last years were tumultuous. I was impressed by the sympathetic view you took of her much younger lover and eventual husband. Most previous biographers haven’t known quite what to make of Giovanni Ossoli. A legacy of incomprehension has come down from her friends. What had the brainy, homely Margaret
O The Personal in the Political
| by Megan Marshall
For a time I believed I must write a biography of Margaret Fuller that turned away from the intrigues in her private life, that spoke of public events solely, and that would affirm ffi her eminence as America’s originating and most consequential theorist of woman’s role in history, culture, and society. Margaret Fuller was, to borrow a phrase coined by one of her friends, a “fore-sayer.” No other writer, until Simone de Beauvoir took up similar themes in the 1940s, had so skillfully critiqued what Margaret Fuller termed in 1843 “the great radical dualism” of gender. “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman,” she had written, anticipating Virginia Woolf’s explorations of male and female character in fiction. Margaret Fuller’s haunting allegories personifying flowers presaged Georgia O’Keeffe’s ff sensual flower paintings; her untimely midcareer death set off ff a persistent public longing to refuse the facts and grant her a different ff fate, similar to the reaction following the midfl flight disappearance of Amelia Earhart nearly one hundred years later. Although she had titled her most influential fl book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, heralding an era in which she expected great advances for women, Margaret Fuller fit more readily among these heroines of the twentieth century. She deserved a place in this international sisterhood whose accomplishments her own pioneering writings helped to make possible. But while I never gave up the aim of representing Margaret Fuller’s many accomplishments, as I read more of her letters, journals, and works in print, I began to recognize the personal in the political. Margaret Fuller’s critique of marriage was formulated during a period of tussling with the unhappily married Ralph Waldo Emerson over the nature of their emotional involvement; her pronouncements on the emerging power of single women evolved from her own struggle with the role; even her brave stand for the Roman Republic could not be separated from her love affair ff with one particular Roman republican. It was not true, as she had written of Mary Wollstonecraft, that Margaret Fuller was “a woman whose existence better proved the need of some new interpretation of woman’s rights, than anything she wrote.” Her writing was eloquent, assured, and uncannily prescient. But her writing also confi firmed my hunch. Margaret Fuller’s published books were hybrids of personal observation, extracts from letters and diaries, confessional poetry; her private journals were fi filled with cultural commentary and reportage on public events. Margaret did not experience her life as divided into public and private; rather, she sought “fulness of being.” She maintained important correspondences with many of the significant fi thinkers and politicians of her day—from Emerson to Harriet Martineau to the Polish poet and revolutionary Adam Mickiewicz—but she valued the letters she received above all for the “history of feeling” they contained. She, like so many of her comrades, both male and female, valued feeling as an inspiration to action in both the private and public spheres. I would write the full story—operatic in its emotional pitch, global in its dimensions. excerpted from Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall. Copyright 2013 by Megan Marshall. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Miffl fflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
Fuller done, taking up with a young, handsome, revolutionary soldier? But they hadn’t seen how comfortable Margaret was in Europe, befriending George Sand in Paris and the exiled revolutionary intellectuals Giuseppe Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz. Of course they had to think Ossoli was a fool.
But I looked at what Fuller said about him, his character and instinctive intelligence, as well as her changing view of what could make her happy. Her own words show just how delighted she was with him in Rome, and afterward when they set up housekeeping in Florence. If she chose him, and chose to stay with him, he must have been worthy.
ê listen to Megan Marshall read from her book at www.radcliffe.harvard.edu. ff