Charles Capper.Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life.Volume 2.The Public Years.:Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life.Volume 2, The Public Years

Abstract

In her essay on critics in the first Dial issue, Margaret Fuller reserves the highest praise for those individuals who embody both apprehensiveness and comprehensiveness. In addition to their ability to “enter into the nature of another being and judge his work by its own law,” she asserts that, “having done so, having ascertained his design and the degree of his success in fulfilling it, thus measuring his judgment, his energy, and skill, they do also know how to put that aim in its place, and how to estimate its relations.” If we approach Fuller's criterion with the “ironic empathy” that Charles Capper employs when considering her “Romantic language and transcendent spiritual hopes” (p. ix), we might apply these critical qualities to the biographer himself. In the long-awaited second volume of his biography of Fuller, Capper reveals both an apprehensiveness and comprehensiveness worthy of her expansive life. Anything short of this breadth and depth would have produced a fragmented biography, one that risked breaking apart Fuller's last decade into distinct “eras” without capturing the cosmopolitan striving that informs the “law” of her evolving personal and professional commitments. As Capper suggests in the preface, the major periods from 1840 to 1850—Fuller's Dial editorship and “Conversations,” her western tour and influential role as the New-York Tribune literary editor, and, finally, her European travels and foreign correspondence—reveal a core cosmopolitanism. (That these particular “eras” warrant distinct volumes in and of themselves speaks to the magnitude of Capper's biographical task.) To borrow from Romantic vocabulary in Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), the unfolding of her causal soul speaks to an expansiveness that contains but is not contained by Boston, New York, or even the revolutionary spirit of Europe's intellectual and political landscape. Arguing that past biographers portray Fuller as arriving in Europe “just in the nick of time, allowing her to find the wider experiences she had tragically missed in the United States,” Capper instead asserts that she came “well prepared to be provoked by and exploit what she encountered” and that she was welcomed by major literary and political figures of Europe because she “appeared to be neither a Transcendentalist nor even much of an American, as they imagined those tribes to be” (p. xvi). Perceiving Fuller through European eyes is a healthy perspective shift, especially when readers, no matter the scholarship of the past two decades, might still frame her importance within the legacy of New England Transcendentalism.