A Conversation With Margaret Fuller
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts and Rev. Leslie Westbrook
October 19, 1997
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
INTERVIEWER: Our special visitor this morning is Margaret Fuller. She has
agreed to join us today in Bethesda to answer a few questions. She has never
before been to the Washington area.
FULLER: When I was a child my father spent four years here, serving two terms
in Congress. However, I stayed in Cambridge, Massachusetts with my mother,
so until today I have never had the opportunity to visiting this community.
INTERVIEWER: Well, we are glad you were willing to be here today. Most of
us here this morning know the writings of your friends, Henry David Thoreau
and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, today people still read Thoreau's story
of his two years living on the edge of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts.
However, because our society still strongly favors men, I must confess that
many of us here know the names Emerson and Thoreau but we do not know the
name Fuller. This morning I would like to enhance our memories, so that in
the future when we think of nineteenth-century Unitarianism in New England
we think not only of Thoreau and Emerson but of Thoreau, Emerson and Fuller.
FULLER: I am delighted to answer your questions.
INTERVIEWER: Tell us a little about your childhood.
FULLER: I was born in the spring of 1810 in a house about a mile from Harvard
College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was the oldest of eight children.
My father resolved to overlook the fact that I was not a boy and set out
to educate me as though I was male. As a result the education I received
was very different from the education most young women received.
INTERVIEWER: According to your biographers you were something of a child
genius.
FULLER: I suppose so, though I worked hard at my studies. By the age of five
I could read. By the time I was six I could read Latin with the fluency of
English. When I was eight years old, my parents punished me for reading
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on Sunday. My parents were liberal Unitarians,
but they felt that reading romantic love stories on the Sabbath was wrong.
At the age of twelve I decided that I would always be bright and ugly. The
peculiarity of my education separated me entirely from other girls, except
that when they were playing active games, I would sometimes go out and join
them. I liked violent bodily exercise, which always relieved my nerves. I
had dreams about being trampled by horses, and although my mother lived out
the length of my life, I had a recurring nightmare about her death.
INTERVIEWER: Looking back on your childhood, how do you feel about your
upbringing?
FULLER: The child fed with meat instead of milk becomes too soon mature.
I do wish that I had read no books at all till later. I wish I had lived
with toys and played in the open air. Children should not cultivate the fruits
of reflection and observation early, but expand in the sun, and let thoughts
come to them.
INTERVIEWER: When did you get involved in the Transcendentalist movement?
FULLER: In 1836 when I was twenty-six years old. The Transcendentalists were
a loose gathering of young intellectuals, mostly Unitarian ministers. They
felt that Unitarianism was too rational and too ritualistic. They believed
that religion should be more a matter of intuition. They were pantheists
people who wandered in the woods around Concord and saw and felt God in all
of creation and especially in themselves.
INTERVIEWER: How did you fit in?
FULLER: After my austere intellectual childhood, I thought the Transcendentalist
movement was designed just to meet my needs! The ideas of Emerson particularly
attracted me. By 1832 Emerson had come to feel that even the few rituals
of the Unitarian services were without meaning. He said that God was best
found in the beauty of nature and in the moral law within us. He left the
Unitarian ministry and sometimes went for walks in the woods on Sunday mornings.
INTERVIEWER: I have here a description written by Emerson about your first
meeting. Do you mind if I read from it?
FULLER: Not at all. I would be interested to hear it. It should bring back
pleasant memories.
INTERVIEWER: Emerson wrote: "I still remember the first half hour of Margaret's
conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. Her extreme plainness, a
trick of opening and shutting her eyelids, the nasal tone of her voice, all
repelled me; and I said to myself, we shall never get far. It is to be said,
that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most persons, including
those who became afterwards her best friends, to such an extreme that they
did not wish to be in the same room with her."
FULLER: Waldo said that!
INTERVIEWER: I am afraid so. Your friends published it as part of a memorial
after your death.
FULLER: Some memorial!
INTERVIEWER: He also said you made him laugh more than he liked.
FULLER: I frightened them all: Emerson, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar
Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, and Horace Greeley. Hawthorne said I was
a "great Humbug." Poe said that humanity was divided into three classes:
men, women, and Margaret Fuller. I think I frightened them because I was
a woman, with more knowledge of the classics than most of them. I had more
energy and intensity than they could handle. Self-assertion that they found
acceptable in men, they found difficult to accept in me. Nevertheless, although
I frightened them, we were friends.
INTERVIEWER: How did you respond to their fears?
FULLER: William Henry Channing wrote me a letter once telling me I was arrogant.
I wrote him back saying: "The word 'arrogance' does not, indeed, appear to
me to be just; probably because I do not understand what you mean. But in
due time I doubtless shall; for so repeatedly have you used it, that it must
stand for something real in my large and rich, yet irregular and unclarified
nature. But though I like to hear you, and think somehow your reproof does
me good, by myself, I return to my native bias, and feel as if there was
plenty of room in the universe for my faults, and, I feel as if I could not
spend time in thinking of them, when so many things interest me more."
INTERVIEWER: As a single woman how did you support yourself?
FULLER: I made most of my income from weekly conversations I led from 1839
until 1844. Paying a small fee, between twenty-five and forty women would
gather at noon once a week for two hours in the parlor of Elizabeth Peabody
in Cambridge. I led discussions on fine arts, ethics, education, and the
effect of women on family, school, church, society and literature. Today
you have many women's discussion groups. But back then nothing like it had
ever been done before. It was the vindication of a woman's right to think.
INTERVIEWER: And out of this experience you published your book called Woman
in the Nineteenth Century, in which you wrote "Male and female represent
the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually
passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid.
There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman." In our time
one historian called your book "the invention of the American feminist movement."
In your own time Edgar Allen Poe wrote "Woman in the Nineteenth Century is
a book that few women in the country could have written, and no woman in
the country would have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller." He
called it "unmitigated radicalism."
FULLER: Yes, and I am proud of it! In doing research for the book, I fought
for and won the right to be the first woman permitted to use the Harvard
College Library. The first printing of 1,000 copies of the book sold out
within a week. It served as an inspiration for the first women's rights
convention held in Seneca Falls.
INTERVIEWER: After publishing the book in 1845, you left New England and
traveled to New York. It was Horace Greeley's wife, Mary, who got you the
job as a reporter for the New York Tribune. What was it like to be the first
woman journalist in America?
FULLER: I loved it. I wrote against capital punishment, against slavery,
and about the condition of women in prison.
INTERVIEWER: How did your friends back in New England react to your new role
in life?
FULLER: Emerson wrote that newspaper reporting vulgarized my lofty mission
as an intellectual, but I ignored him.
INTERVIEWER: In 1846 Horace Greeley sent you to Europe. You were one of the
first American reporters of either sex to become a foreign correspondent.
Can you tell us about that experience?
FULLER: I traveled in England and in France and settled in Rome in 1847.
The Italian way of life was a radical contrast to what I had grown accustomed
to in New England. My new Italian friends urged me to root my life more in
the physical present: "Breathe life through your pores and prolong your good
moments," one friend said to me. I took their advice. In the fall of 1847,
at the age of 37, I took an Italian nobleman as my lover, Angelo Ossoli.
He was 10 years younger than I. In September 1848, I gave birth to a baby
boy whom we named Angelo after his father. Only one month later, I had to
leave the baby with a nurse in a small village safely away from Rome. I joined
Ossoli in Rome. He and many others were fighting against an invading French
army. We wanted to establish a socialist republic in Italy; the French were
trying to prevent it. During the revolution I worked as a nurse and director
of a hospital. For the first time in my life I lived totally in the present.
INTERVIEWER: I have here a copy of an account written by a friend in Rome.
I would like to read it.
FULLER: Please do.
INTERVIEWER: He wrote: "During the siege of Rome, Ossoli's post was one of
considerable danger; he being in one of the most exposed places. Margaret
saw his wounded and dying comrades and she feared that another shot might
take him from her or bring him to her care in the hospital. She watched as
the carts came up with their suffering loads, knowing that her worst fears
might be confirmed. No argument of ours could persuade Ossoli to leave his
post to take food or rest. Sometimes we went to him and carried a concealed
basket of provisions but he shared it with so many of his fellows, that his
portion must have been almost nothing. Haggard, worn, and pale, he walked
over the Vatican grounds with us, pointing out, now here, now there, where
some poor fellow's blood sprinkled the wall." During these events, you kept
sending us a regular column in the New York Tribune in which you described
the political situation in Europe. And you kept up a regular correspondence
with your friends in New England. But you said nothing about your Italian
lover or your new baby boy. Why was this?
FULLER: My life in Rome was so different from my sheltered life in New England.
I honestly thought that my old friends would not understand or accept me.
Then in the summer of 1849 the republican forces lost the struggle against
the French. Angelo and I decided to travel to the United States with our
child. In September of 1849 I wrote my mother about Ossoli: "He is not in
any respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with
me. He had no instructor except an old priest, who entirely neglected his
education, and of all that is contained in books, he is absolutely ignorant.
On the other hand, he has excellent practical sense. He has been a judicious
observer of all that passed before his eyes; he has a sense of duty, which
in its unfailing, minute activity, may put most enthusiasts to shame; a sweet
temper, and a great native refinement."
INTERVIEWER: At this point you began to call Ossoli your husband.
FULLER: Yes. I thought this would make us more acceptable in the eyes of
my old friends.
INTERVIEWER: Tell us about the trip home.
FULLER: At the time of my 40th birthday, in May of 1850, my husband,
my child, and I set sail for America. On July 18, the ship neared New York
and we packed our things and prepared for arrival the next day. We went to
sleep that night after the first officer promised that we would be eating
breakfast in New York the next morning. At 4:00 a.m. on July 19, the jarring
of the ship awakened us as it ran aground on the Fire Island beach. The freight
weighted down the hold, and the ship began to leak. At 7:00 a.m. the cabins
began to break up and we scrambled across the deck to the forecastle. As
the light came up we could make out the shore only 50 yards away. Eventually
people appeared on the shore but they did not try to rescue us. For some
time we watched each other over the rolling waves, then a sailor and the
captain's widow, clinging to a plank made it to shore. I would not follow.
I refused to be separated from my husband and child. The mate and all but
four sailors then abandoned us and swam to shore. Finally late in the day,
the ship steward took our child and leaped into the sea. We watched in horror
as both of them drowned before reaching the shore. Sometime later a wave
washed my husband overboard. And then, after gripping the ship for 12 hours,
I lost my hold. I was swept into the sea.
INTERVIEWER: Margaret, what thought can you leave with us this morning, we
who live after you?
FULLER: What I would say to you is: Never stop growing! This is what I learned
in my 40 years of living. Never stop changing! Read, explore, travel, ask
questions, experiment, make new friends, try new things! Treat others with
kindness but do not worry about what other people think about you! Live your
life fully! In my letter to my mother telling her about my marriage and child,
I put it this way: Life is so uncertain; it is necessary to enjoy the good
things with their limitations.
INTERVIEWER: Thank you, Margaret Fuller.
Source: Chevigny, Bell Gale, The Woman and the Myth, Margaret Fuller's
Life and Writings, The Feminist Press, 1976.
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