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Margaret Fuller and Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Robert D. Richardson Jr
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Extract

Margaret Fuller Was “many women in one,” and, as Thomas W. Higginson observed, “there is room for a difference of opinion even in assigning a key-note to her life.” Higginson thought the early biographies made too much of her “desire for self-culture.” Some more recent studies put their chief emphasis on her feminist and revolutionary activities. Higginson's own view, persuasively expressed in his 1884 account of her life, is that “what she always most desired was not merely self-culture, but a career of mingled thought and action such as she finally found.” It is clear that after her father died in 1835, leaving twenty-five-year-old Margaret the head of the family, her life became more and more public. From teaching school to conducting her famous Conversations, to editing The Dial, to working for Horace Greeley's Tribune in New York, to her involvement with Mazzini and the Roman revolution of 1848, the intellectual radicalism of the Transcendentalist steadily widened into the social and political activism of the revolutionary. The increasingly active side of the last ten years of her short life was not so much a reaction against her earlier beliefs as it was, in important ways, a natural outgrowth of them. The two sides of her life were closely, causally connected; nowhere is this clearer than in her considerable but largely ignored interest in myth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 4 , October 1979 , pp. 169 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. Higginson, T. W., Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston and New York, 1884), P. 4.Google Scholar

2. Ibid. Among recent studies, see especially Diess, J. J., The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969)Google Scholar; Allen, M. V., “The Political and Social Criticism of Margaret Fuller,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 72 (Autumn 1973), 560–73Google Scholar; Hopkins, V. C., “Margaret Fuller: Pioneer Woman's Liberationist,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 18 (Spring 1973), 29–35Google Scholar; and Chevigny, B. G., The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976).Google Scholar

3. Higginson, , Margaret Fuller Ossoli, p. 114.Google ScholarClarke, J. F., Emerson, R. W., and Channing, W. H., eds., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1852). I, pp. 329, 21.Google Scholar

4. In the third Conversation in Dall, Caroline Healy's Margaret and her Friends (Boston, 1895)Google Scholar, MF tells a mythic fable “from Novalis.” For Richter and Eichhorn, see Higginson, , Margaret Fuller Ossoli, p. 45.Google Scholar For her interest in Goethe, see Braun, F. A., Margaret Fuller and Goethe (New York, 1910)Google Scholar, and Durning, R. E., “Margaret Fuller's Translation of Goethe's ‘Prometheus,’” in Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 12 (1967), 243.Google Scholar For De Wette, and Herder, , see Memoirs of Margaret Fuiler Ossoli, I, p. 175.Google Scholar Proclus, Taylor, Scandinavian myth and Apuleius are quoted in Fuller, Margaret, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845; rpt. New York: Norton, 1971).Google Scholar For Schoolcraft see Wade, Mason, The Writings of Margaret Fuller (New York: Viking, 1941), pp. 24–25.Google Scholar For Moeller, , see Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, II, p. 137Google Scholar; Heeren, 's ResearchesGoogle Scholar (which had been translated by George Bancroft) is mentioned in Dall, , Margaret and Her Friends, p. 138.Google Scholar Jacob Bryant, Creuzer, and the latter's “french translator” are discussed in the same volume, p. 157. There are also manuscript notes from Creuzer in Vol. V of MF's Works in the Harvard Library.

5. Quoted by Brown, A. W., Margaret Fuller (New Haven, Conn.: Twayne Publishers, 1964), p. 30.Google Scholar

6. Durning, , Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, p. 243.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., p. 244.

8. Ibid.

9. Howe, Julia Ward, Margaret Fuller (1833; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1968), p. 110.Google Scholar Traces of German idealism occur frequently in MF's work. For example, she once said, “Mythology is only the history of the development of the Infinite in the Finite,” Dall, , Margaret and Her Friends, p. 26.Google Scholar

10. Fuller, Margaret, Works (a five-volume manuscript in the Harvard Library), V, pp. 459–61.Google Scholar

11. Brown, , Margaret Fuller, p. 55.Google Scholar

12. Clarke, and Channing, , eds., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, I, p. 329.Google Scholar For a discussion of the value of these comments as evidence, see Wade, , The Writings of Margaret Fuller, p. 76.Google Scholar

13. Clarke, and Channing, , eds., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, p. 330.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., p. 333.

15. Fuller, , Works, III, p. 409.Google Scholar

16. Clarke, and Channing, , eds., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, p. 333.Google Scholar

17. Dall, , Margaret and her Friends, p. 25.Google Scholar

18. Fuller, Margaret, Journal (manuscript in the Harvard College Library), entry for 02 21, 1841.Google Scholar

19. Dall, , Margaret and Her Friends, pp. 68, 95, 105.Google Scholar

20. Wade, , Writings of Margaret Fuller, pp. 24–25.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 90.

22. Fuller, , Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 51.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 210.

24. Ibid., p. 55.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., pp. 22–23.

28. Ibid., p. 23.

29. Ibid., pp. 23–24.

30. Ibid., p. 105.

31. Ibid., p. 115.

32. Ibid., p. 116.

33. Fuller, , Works, V, p. 453.Google Scholar

34. Fuller, , Woman in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 118–19.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 121.

36. Fuller, , Works, V, p. 453.Google Scholar