The Life and Legacy of Margaret Fuller: Transcendentalism and Feminism

Introduction and Historical Reputation. "I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other" (Woman in the Nineteenth Century). Nathaniel Hawthorne sailed with her and joined her on long, lakeside walks. Ralph Waldo Emerson, according to Hawthorne, proclaimed that she was "the greatest woman, I believe, of ancient or modern times, and the one figure in the world worth considering" (Miller 231).

Margaret Fuller had a dalliance with the great Ludwig van Beethoven, whom she addressed in correspondence as "My only friend" and to whom she went on to write, "Oh blessed master! Like a humble wife to the sage or poet, it is my triumph that I can understand, can receive thee wholly, like a mistress . . . thou art all I want" (Miller 232). The influential transcendentalist and educator Bronson Alcott further sang her praises by stating, "She had the intellect of a man inspired by the heart of a woman, combining harmonious marriage of the masculine and feminine in her genius." He added, "We have no woman approaching so near our conception of the ideal woman as herself" (Miller 231-232). Perhaps not surprising, considering the high regard in which she was held by some of the greatest minds of her age, Margaret Fuller showed complete agreement with their consensus: "I know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own" (Memoirs 1:65).

Even though effusive praise of her was written by almost every significant thinker of her day, Fuller was viewed by scholars as deserving little more than a literary footnote for her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1843) until the modern feminist movement of the 1970s elevated her to the status she enjoyed during the early to mid-19th century. As more and more scholarly research is done on her social, literary, and intellectual contributions, as well as her personal and literary influence, she has emerged as a central figure of early 19th-century American culture and a major figure in the development of the women's rights movement.

Intellectual Formation and Early Education. Given Sarah Margaret Fuller's unusual childhood, it is easy to see in her earliest years the embryonic promise of genius. Her early education took place under the stern tutelage of her father, Timothy Fuller, a Harvard graduate who was both a lawyer and a politician. Fuller was taught Latin and by the age of eight was reading Ovid in its original language. She then learned Greek and soon moved on to Italian, French, and German. Before she was old enough to enter eighth grade, she had devoured William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Miguel de Cervantes.

Soon her father recognized he could not instruct her alone and arranged to have her tutored by scholars from Harvard. Though women were not allowed to enroll in the male-only Harvard College, Fuller became the first female ever admitted to the school library, where she read avidly while continuing her home studies, becoming a masterful writer and an expert in Italian, German, and, of course, American literature. Indeed, so gifted and accomplished was she that Emerson, the most esteemed philosopher and intellectual of the period, called her one of his "luminaries;" "A woman," he said, "who seems to have learned all languages" and whose mind was "wise, magnificent . . . gifted" (Memoirs 1:215).

The euphoria, however, had a price. Later in life, Fuller was to suffer health problems, including nearly disabling headaches. She blamed her father for this and felt he had pushed her too hard and had in many ways cost her her childhood. In Memoirs Fuller wrote that children "should not through books ante-date their actual experiences, but should take them gradually, as sympathy and interpretation are needed" (2:44). With the death of her father in 1835 Fuller was thrust into the position of being the primary breadwinner for her family, which included her mother, a sister, and five brothers. Though she would later mourn her youth in the unfinished "Autobiographical Sketch," stating that she realized she had become "a prodigy by day, and at night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism" (Portable 161), her sense of duty led her to a teaching position at Temple School in Boston.

The Transcendentalist Movement and Teaching Career. Founded by Bronson Alcott, the father of LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, Temple School stressed individual progress, searching for a higher moral purpose, and practiced what for the time was revolutionary: racial integration. It was during this period that Fuller began to develop relationships with many of the leading intellectuals in New England. The Alcotts were social activists and saw in Fuller a kindred spirit they happily introduced to such notables as Hawthorne, Emerson, William Henry Channing, and George Ripley.

The transcendentalist movement (ca. 1835-60) was just beginning to gain prominence. A philosophical and literary system permeated by romantic idealism and inspired by both the German idealist philosophers and the romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, transcendentalism proved a seductive siren to the facile mind of the young Fuller. The combination of her rich humanities background, her newly acquired skills in education, and the emerging confidence she gained from becoming more and more independent allowed her quickly to become an influential force in the movement. In the end the movement would be remembered for the major literary accomplishments achieved by writers such as HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Hawthorne, Emerson, HERMAN MELVILLE, and WALT WHITMAN and for the influence it exerted in the political sphere (abolition of slavery, women's rights). And Fuller was in the thick of it all.

One of the most significant relationships Fuller developed during these heady times was with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a pioneer in female education. At a time when male exclusivity was the order of day and women were not allowed in universities, legislatures, or even on tours as paid public speakers, Fuller and Peabody were asked to join the Transcendentalist Club. This shocking invitation solidified in the public's mind the radical nature of the movement, while it also facilitated an ever-widening circle of friendships that profoundly influenced Fuller's thought and future conduct. Though she never joined any of the utopian communities that sprang from the movement, she did visit her fellow club member Ripley's Brook Farm, and it was here that she met Hawthorne. Over the next decade Fuller and Hawthorne would spend much time together, often engaging in conversations regarding politics, culture, and literature. Indeed, when Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance appeared, "readers quickly concluded that the exotic Zenobia was the fictional counterpart of Margaret Fuller" (Miller 239).

The freshness of all these new ideas was a bit too much for some. An open approach to learning and the use of a Socratic method that encouraged the questioning of traditional institutions drew Temple School so much public criticism that enrollment dropped. Fuller realized that as the least senior member of the faculty she might be laid off and so tendered her resignation. Paradoxically, this loss of a job for Fuller would lead to what many scholars argue was her most productive and significant period. Taking a position at the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, she immersed herself in the busy job of teaching rhetoric, Latin, French, poetry, and history to 60 boys and girls. She was especially excited about awakening the minds of the girls to the possibility of going beyond the restrictions society had heretofore placed upon them.

The Conversation Club and Literary Contributions. Fuller refused to let the students sit passively and take notes on her lectures, nor did she encourage the common practice of rote memorization. She explained, "A lesson is as far as possible from being learned by heart when it is said to be, it is only learned by body. I wish you to get your lessons by mind" (Kornfeld 23). Her fundamental classroom rules were "let nothing pass from you in reading or conversation that you do not understand, without trying to find out" and "let not your age or shame of being thought ignorant prevent you from asking questions about things or words you do not understand" (Kornfeld 23). Clearly, Fuller was beginning to discover her great passion. She wanted to teach people, especially women, to think for themselves. This process of being able to ascertain what was important and made sense to the individual would constitute the earliest stages of what she would later describe as "self-culture."

Always a person who enjoyed writing and considered it important to record one's thoughts, Fuller faced a great conundrum: Should she continue a vocation that allowed her to touch the lives of a few individuals profoundly on a personal level, or should she pursue a course that would take her ideas to a broader audience? Teaching was a wonderfully fulfilling and rewarding profession, but as many teachers before and since have discovered, it takes all of one's time and energy to do it well. Contemplating her love of teaching and her desire to write, she mused: "I cannot serve two masters." Of her teaching she finally concluded that to continue would mean to keep on "fulfilling all my duties . . . except to myself" (Letters 1:327). And so, in December 1838 Fuller left the Greene Street School to return to Boston to see whether she could enter the public arena as a writer. It was a decision that was perhaps as important as any in American history in regard to the awakening of the women's movement.

When Fuller again took up residence in Boston, she began two major undertakings. She established a Conversation Club for women in November 1839, and together with Emerson she founded the transcendentalist journal the Dial, agreeing to serve as the publication's first editor. Both endeavors were to occupy her until she left New England in 1844 and would ultimately shape her historical persona. As so often happens when necessity and desire meet intelligence and creativity, great art was born. Though Fuller may never be celebrated as a writer on par with her male contemporaries Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, no one can doubt the profound influence of her conversation series on the nascent women's movement.

The fact that she enjoyed a public venue for discussing her developing ideas about feminism through her mystical meditations on beauty and spiritual power during her conversations, as well as a political and literary forum to state her views in the Dial, arguably made her one of the most powerful intellectual voices in mid-19th-century United States. Fully 20 years later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony named Fuller in the dedication of their famous History of Woman Suffrage, stating that she had "possessed more influence upon the thought of American woman than any previous to her time." Indeed, Stanton, one of more than 200 women who attended the conversations over the four years they were held, concluded that ultimately they became "a vindication of woman's right to think" (Kornfeld 26). Never was this made more clear than when Fuller drew upon much of what she had been discussing with these women to write an article published in the Dial, in July 1843, entitled "The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women." This would later be expanded upon and published as the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a work that would become part of the canon of transcendental literature as well as a cornerstone for the future women's movement and would ever after be viewed as Fuller's magnum opus. Exhausted from essentially working for three years at two jobs as a lecturer-conversationalist and editor, Fuller took a well-deserved vacation in summer 1843.

Journalistic Career and European Correspondence. Her dear friends James and Sarah Clarke invited her to accompany them on a trip west to the Great Lakes and the Wisconsin Territory. From this experience she wrote Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. America was at the time enthralled by "travel books," and her work enjoyed modest success. What quickly became apparent, however, was that unlike the vast majority of the writers who published in this genre, Fuller could not have cared less about describing fauna and terrain as suitable subjects in and of themselves. Instead, she used them as a means of challenging her readers to explore their own inner "territory" (Summer 13).

Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 caught the attention of the powerful Horace Greeley, who offered Fuller the job of literary critic for his New-York Daily Tribune. In December 1844 she accepted the position and moved to New York City. In many ways this move would mark the end of her tenure as a key figure in American transcendentalism. Just seven years after leaving Greene Street School, Fuller had successfully transformed herself from a provincial "schoolmarm" into a widely recognized contributor to U.S. literature. Interestingly, just as it appeared that she had found her niche as a writer of long-form nonfiction prose, she switched her primary focus. From this point until her untimely death five years hence it would be as a journalist that Fuller would make her mark.

During the short time from late 1844, when Fuller moved to New York City and began her journalism career, until the 1846 publication of her influential article "American Literature, Its Position in the Present Time and Its Prospects for the Future," it was becoming clear that even though Fuller still appreciated the realm of literature and its purity in terms of the written word, she also fully understood the emerging power of the press. Whereas her years of leading the Conversation Club in Boston never reached more than a few hundred New England women (albeit many of great influence), her front-page columns in the Tribune reached close to 30,000 readers every day. As a woman who had been forced to support herself during most of her adulthood, Fuller had a very real pragmatic side to her life, visible even when considering questions of art. She had long maintained that life should be a balance between thought and action, and now she had an ideal vehicle to espouse her doctrine and simultaneously address the myriad social causes dear to her heart.

Fuller pioneered new techniques in investigative journalism by visiting and analyzing the city's prisons and mental asylums as well as writing about rapidly emerging urban problems such as prostitution. She wrote more than 250 articles during this highly productive period. Her growing interest in exposing contemporary social problems and suggesting practical reforms separated her from many of the transcendentalists such as Emerson, who tended to focus most of their energy on abstract theories. Fuller was not even daunted when Emerson questioned her seeming abandonment of the transcendentalist movement to pursue journalism, writing that "the Newspaper promises to become daily of more importance, and if the increase of the size be managed with equal discretion, to draw within itself the substance of all other literature of the day" (Letters 2:87). It was with this idea ringing in her head that she decided to accept the offer by Greeley to become America's first foreign correspondent by traveling to Europe and sending back her impressions, or "dispatches," as she saw fit.

Fuller's life would be a roller coaster from this point on. She sailed to England in August 1846 as one of America's first foreign correspondents and while there met the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. She also met other writers, such as the English writer Thomas Carlyle and the French novelist George Sand, but it was her meeting with Mazzini that sparked her interest in the Italian revolution and led her to take up residence in Rome in summer 1847. Fuller immersed herself in the revolutionary efforts of the Italian people and in her dispatches to the Tribune called for Americans to support the republican uprising. It was also during this period that she met the marchese Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a son, Angelo, in September 1848. Fuller and Ossoli probably married in 1849, the same year that Rome fell to French troops, after which they fled to Florence.

Tragic Death and Posthumous Legacy. From there Fuller, her new husband, and their baby son set sail for America in May 1850 (Kornfeld 66). Two months later, a day before they were to arrive in New York City, their merchantman, the Elizabeth, encountered a fierce storm off Fire Island. The young family of three perished. The body of one of the most influential female voices in the formative early life of American literature, philosophy, and women's rights was never recovered.

A great outpouring of grief followed the news of Margaret Fuller's death. Tributes were written by many of the luminaries of the transcendental movement as well as the women's rights movement. Her works were compiled and published by Emerson himself, and she enjoyed a brief moment of posthumous recognition. The turbulent times of abolitionism and pre-Civil War friction quickly pushed discussion of her works to the side, however, and it would not be until the feminist movement of the 1970s rediscovered this clarion voice from the 19th century that her works began to receive the serious attention they enjoy today.