“One of the Most Gifted Women of the Age”: Zenobia, Margaret Fuller, and de Staël'sCorinneinThe Blithedale Romance

Abstract

Since its publication in 1852,The Blithedale Romancehas gained a measure of notoriety for its widely perceived use of Margaret Fuller as a model for the character of Zenobia. Contemporary admirers of the pioneering feminist, woman of letters, and social reformer were dismayed by Hawthorne's evident appropriation of Fuller's life in a romance obviously based on the Brook Farm community of the early 1840s in which Hawthorne participated and Fuller was a regular visitor. In his post-Civil War “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” for example, Emerson lodged a vigorous protest: “No friend who knew Margaret Fuller could recognize her rich and brilliant genius under the dismal mask which the public fancied was meant for her in that disagreeable story” (Lectures, 342). The potential insult to Fuller's memory inBlithedalewas compounded by overt injury when, three decades after the novel's publication, in an 1884 biography of his parents, Julian Hawthorne included a suppressed passage on Fuller from his father'sFrench and Italian Notebooks— an outspoken attack on Fuller as an intellectual humbug and fallen woman that conceivably threw a lurid light back on the portrait of Zenobia.