Reading Margaret Fuller

Abstract

Reading Margaret FullerA comparative review of John Matteson's The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (2012) and Megan Marshall's Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (2013), this review essay addresses the problems these excellent new biographies, aimed at broader audiences, seek remedy: Why does a figure of such wide influence and intellectual significance continue dwell in relative obscurity? And why does life story continue overshadow work?Reading Margaret Fuller THE LIVES OF MARGARET FULLER: A BIOGRAPHY. By John Matteson. New York: Norton, 2012. xvi + 510 pp. $32.95.MARGARET FULLER: A NEW AMERICAN LIFE. By Megan Marshall. Boston: Houghton, 2013. xxi + 474 pp. $30.Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810, and died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, on July 19, 1850. Compressed into those forty years was one of nineteenth-century America's most remarkable careers: of a prodigiously gifted child educated by a demanding father (whose hunger for achievement, self-improvement, and recognition she internalized), who grew up be treated as an equal by leading minds of generation, both in the United States and in Europe; who became a groundbreaking cultural and social critic, translator, editor, educator, journalist, travel writer, foreign correspondent, revolutionary, and historian-and a feminist theorist whose work continues surprise each new generation of readers and whose influence can hardly be measured.Yet why is she still so little known? At the start of this century, Elaine Showalter noted to most educated Americans she is nothing more than a name in a textbook. There is no Margaret Fuller Memorial, no museum, no national holiday, not even a postage stamp. Despite enormous academic interest in life and work, Fuller has not captured the American historical imagination (130). In preparation for the two hundredth anniversary of Fuller's birth in 2010, members of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee wrote a nomination letter the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, making the case for a Fuller stamp. To date, the U.S. Post Office has issued no such stamp.Three major explanations for Fuller's relative obscurity are usually in play. One: feminism is difficult understand, not radical enough, and emphasizes development over social change. As early as 1845, on receipt of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, feminist acquaintance John Neal protested, All you and others are doing elevate woman, is only fitted make feel more sensibly the long abuse of own understanding, when she comes senses. You might as well educate slaves-and still keep them in bondage (qtd. in Chevigny 235). Two: Fuller's personal mystique has always attracted more interest than work: in a 1993 review, Susan Belasco Smith cited Fuller's own fear that she would become known as a 'professional character' and not the 'professional author' she wished be. This interest in Fuller's personality was also fueled by spectacular love story (at age thirtyseven, she conceived a child out of wedlock by an impecunious Italian eleven years junior), and dramatic death with husband and child. Three: [H]er pen was a non-conductor (qtd. in Fuller, Margaret Fuller 2: 86), as Emerson suggested (in contrast conversational brilliance), an idea still worrisome Showalter, though stated in a more nuanced fashion: When taken together, essays, pamphlets, poems, and reviews demonstrate a powerful, original mind. One by one, though, they are unlovable, too often stiff or prolix or rambling. She didn't have [Henry David] Thoreau's folksiness or sententiousness, or [Bronson] Alcott's narrative gift. But private letters, Showalter thought, might be likely win new readers and admirers, and, had she survived the shipwreck, her public writings might have grown more like private letters, capable of touching readers' emotions as well as their intellects (130-31). …