[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
If you're a friend of entitled opinions,
if you're a citizen of that city where philosophers and poets
are your fellow Romans,
if you're a countryman who cultivates ideas and free thinking,
then lend me your ears, friends,
Romans, countrymen.
It has been a full nine months since our last confession
and during that long stretch of silence some of you panicked,
wondering whether entitled opinions had disappeared into the darkness for good,
others of you showed patience trusting that we would be true to our
word and return to the air and do time.
Well, here you go.
This is what WB Yates would call speech after long silence.
It is right.
All other lovers being estranged or dead.
Unfriendly lamplight hid beneath its shade.
Curtin's drawn upon unfriendly night that we decant
and yet again decant upon the supreme theme of art and song.
And the song, it goes on.
[ Music ]
here, outside the studios of KESU, it's obscenely spring like at the moment.
The time of year the troubadour poets used to call the 'heve-deh', the
'greening of the world'.
So as the world greens consider this show, I kind of
preliminary welcome back.
I can tell you that in the past several months I've been
devoting myself to trying to finish a book that has been dragging on for
way too long as far as I'm concerned.
And I think I may have actually succeeded in doing that.
You'll be hearing more about this book from me in the not-too-distant future I hope.
I may even share some of its thoughts with you on air, but it's too early for that at this point.
Instead what I thought I would do today is share with you some thoughts about one of the
most extraordinary women this American nation of ours ever gave birth to.
Her name, Margaret Fuller.
Her memorial plaque in Cambridge, Massachusetts erected after her death in 1850 reads, "By
birth a child of New England, by adoption a citizen of Rome, by genius belonging to the
world.
Anyone who is a citizen of Rome by adoption is welcome on entitled 'Pinience Any Day'.
And today's your day, Margaret, welcome to the show."
Thank you Robert, I'm looking forward to this.
I didn't know much about Margaret Fuller the last time in title opinions aired back in
June 2012.
I knew her name and I knew that she was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and was connected
to the transcendentalist movement in New England.
I also knew she edited the transcendentalist famous journal The Dial and that she died
in a shipwreck after spending some years in Italy where she got pregnant and got married
in that order.
And where she participated in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 and 49 in Rome.
But beyond that I knew little about her until I was asked by the New York Review of
Books to review two new biographies of Fuller, which I accepted to do.
Some of you may know that I write for the New York Review of Books occasionally.
I've published about ten articles with them in the past three or four years.
And I happen to think that the New York Review is by far, by far, the best journal in the
United States, that it's long time editor Robert Silver's is a true American hero and
that there is nothing that comes close to the quality and depth of the articles that
Silver solicits and publishes issue after issue decade after decade.
Anyway I did review these two new biographies of Fuller.
It's now late March and my article is scheduled to come out in the next issue of the New
York Review so I thought I would take this occasion to share with you before that article
comes out a little of what I learned about this remarkable woman as I read not only the
two most recent biographies of her life but earlier ones as well in addition to reading
her own writings and above all her Magnus Opus woman in the 19th century which was published
in 1846 and on which her intellectual reputation largely rests today.
One of the biographies I reviewed is by John Madison, MATESON, Madison won a Pulitzer
Prize for his earlier life of Louisa May Alcott and her father.
It's called The Lives of Margaret Fuller and was published by Norton in 2012.
510 pages long.
The other is by Meghan Marshall who also previously authored a triple biography of the Peabody
sisters, two of which sisters by the way Sophia and Elizabeth were close friends of Margaret
Fuller.
So, Phi-A-P-Body being the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne and more about him later.
Meghan Marshall's biography is called Margaret Fuller, a New American Life published by
Harcourt in 2013.
It's 450 pages long.
Let me make full disclosure here at the outset and state for the record that I really
do not like biographies at all.
The last thing I would ever do is write one.
I can't imagine spending the years it takes to write a biography inside someone else's
life and head.
I know biographies are popular and in great demand, especially these days, yet I can't
understand people who would never read a word of Wittgenstein or C-1-Vay who would
eagerly read all about their lives.
I simply don't get it.
I mean yes, I do get it in the sense that I understand people have a voracious desire
to know about other people's lives, especially the more intimate and shameful aspects
of them, but I guess I don't understand why it thrills them rather than depresses them.
Biographies depress me almost invariably and in that respect I share something in common
with Margaret Fuller herself.
In a letter to her friend James Freeman Clark in 1833, Margaret Fuller wrote the following,
"All biographies make me sick at heart and make it hard to realize there is a heaven."
As I said, our age shows no such distaste.
We clamor for biographies.
We believe that the lives of our thinkers, statesmen, artists and scientists hold the secret
to their contributions to culture, but in this I think we're deluded.
The aspirations that lie behind a person's achievements invariably transcend the sum
of days that make up a life.
It's judged by its inner incentive every life is a failure.
Ever since Emerson, William Channing and James Freeman Clark published the memoirs of Margaret
Fuller, that was an instant bestseller when it came out in 1852 two years after Fuller
perished at sea.
Fuller's life and her personality have received far more attention than her work.
So for example, the two books that I reviewed come on the heels of several other recent biographies
of Fuller published in the last decade alone.
Among them, the gold standard two-volume opus by Charles Capre, as well as the sterling biographies
of Meg, Megavran Murray, Joan von Merren, Bell-Gale-Shiviny, and numerous earlier ones as well.
When you add to this mix the recent semi-biographical novel by April Bernard called Miss Fuller,
which came out last year in 2012, and we now have a huge surplus of riches to choose from
if we want to make ourselves sick at heart over Margaret Fuller's fate.
In the lives of Margaret Fuller, which really is an excellent book in his genre, I have
to say, John Madison speaks for most of her biographers when he declares, I quote, "Margaret
Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation."
In the lives of Margaret Fuller, which really is an excellent book in his genre, John Madison
speaks for most of her biographers when he declares, I quote, "Margaret Fuller's life was
her most remarkable creation."
In her biography, Meg and Marshall writes that Fuller's published books were, as she puts
it, I quote, "hybrids of personal observation extracts from letters and diaries confessional
poetry."
The absence of a clear line of demarcation between Fuller's private and public life
inspired Marshall, she says, I quote, "to write the whole story operatic in its pitch global
in its dimensions."
So there you go.
Whether one shares the view that Fuller's life and work are inseparable, I personally
do not, although it is true that her life was, in some respects, a more remarkable creation
than her work.
Regardless of how one feels about the relationship between life and work in the case of Margaret
Fuller, it's hard to imagine someone beginning a book or a course on her the way Martin
Heidegger reportedly began a seminar on Aristotle.
According to the students who were there, on the first day of class, Heidegger stated,
Aristotle was born, he worked, and he died.
Now let's move on to his thought.
The John Madison biography has a kind of baritone eloquence about it, and I would like
to just read from his prologue because he gives a rather excellent synopsis of Fuller's major
achievements in life and the role her death played in our nation's memory of her.
So I'm going to quote a few paragraphs from his prologue.
Margaret Fuller was, in her time, the best-read woman in America and the one most renowned
for her intelligence.
She was the leading female figure in the New England movement known as Transcendentalism.
She edited the first avant-garde intellectual magazine in America, the dial.
She was the first regular foreign correspondent, male or female, for an American newspaper.
As a literary critic, she was rivaled in her era only by Edgar Allan Poe.
Three years before the convention that is usually regarded as the beginning of the women's
rights movement in the United States, she wrote a groundbreaking book demanding legal equality
for women.
That's the book I mentioned earlier, "Woman in the 19th Century."
And yet, if the ordinary person knows only one thing about Margaret Fuller, that particle
of knowledge is likely not to concern any of her achievements, but how her life came to an end.
At the age of 40, having spent almost three and a half years in Europe as a foreign correspondent
for the New York Tribune, Fuller sailed back to America to begin a new life with the husband
she had met in Rome, Marquez de Giovanni Osoli, and their young son Angelina.
New life never began.
On July 19, 1850, with inside of land, the ship on which the Osolis were traveling struck
a sandbar off the coast of Fire Island, New York, and in the midst of a fierce and
unseasonable hurricane broke apart and sank.
Though most of the people on board managed to reach the shore alive, none of the Osolis
survived.
This was how Margaret Fuller became ingrained in our history.
Not as the sparkling conversationalists in liveening, Ralph Waldo Emerson's study, or
the bookstores of Boston with her wit and airy addition.
Not as the impromptu military nurse giving aid to freedom fighters who had fallen in the
streets of Rome defending their new republic, not even as the accomplished and dedicated
scholar churning out a stunning body of literary criticism and social commentary, but as a
fore-lorn and exhausted figure beside a broken mast, her hands on her knees clad only in
a soaked through nightgown, soon to feel the wave that would thruster overboard and into
eternity.
Fuller's sudden death, I'm speaking to my own voice now, brought an end to the ongoing evolution
of her female persona for which there existed no blueprints at the time.
Fuller single-handedly expanded the frontiers of American female identity in the 19th
century and succeeded against enormous odds in becoming a new kind of woman in a world
that had precious little room for women in the public sphere.
And the 20th century, I believe, never quite caught up with her vision.
Margaret Fuller became the best-read woman in America, thanks in part to the exacting tutelage
of her father Timothy Fuller, who taught his daughter to read and write in her fourth
year and began training her in Latin shortly thereafter.
Timothy Fuller has taken a lot of slack from commentators and biographers for being excessively
disciplinary in the education of his daughter Margaret, but it really was Timothy who lies
at the origin of this extraordinary erudition that Margaret Fuller has remembered for.
And throughout her youth, Fuller remained fiercely committed to improving her education,
teaching herself French, German, and Italian, and immersing herself above all in the classics,
the Greek and Roman classics, which provided the basis for all her future thinking.
She later would come to feel that this precocious program of study robbed her of a good
deal of what she called life.
I quote from her writing later in life, "I do wish that I had read no books at all
until later that I had lived with toys and played in the open air.
Children should not call the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand in
the sun and let thoughts come to them.
They should not through books, and to date their actual experiences, but should take them
gradually as sympathy and interpretation are needed with me.
Much of life was devoured in the butt."
At Margaret Fuller been a man, there's little doubt, hardly any doubt at all that she would
have attended Harvard University, which at the time did not admit women.
However, Margaret Fuller became the first woman to receive permission to use Harvard's library.
And had she gone to Harvard, she most likely would have improved her writing skills rather
than struggling on her own for most of her life to put thoughts into words.
Emerson overstated the case a bit when he asserted that Fuller's pen was a non-conductor
as he called it.
In passages in her written works so as high as any transcendentalist, yet Fuller herself
acknowledged in her journal, "I will write well yet, but never, I think, as well as
I talk."
To say that she talked well, understates the case, because by all reports Fuller's spoken
word was magnetic and inspirational.
Emerson wrote in his journals about her silver eloquence, which in most Polymonia taught,
as he put it, " Polymonia being one of the muses."
In the classroom where she taught young girls, she enthralled her students and many of them
both at the Temple School in Boston, where she taught for a year in 1836, and at the
Green School, in Providence, where she taught from 1837 to 1839, many of her students
went on to become teachers themselves so much where they inspired by Fuller's advocacy
of women's education.
From 1839 until 1844 Fuller led a series of famous conversations for women in Boston,
since they couldn't go to the university, they were held independently in the bookstore of
Elizabeth P. Body, actually, and in these conversations, which were women only except for
one or two exceptions, she would adopt this a kratic method, electrified the participants,
in the building freely in the literature mythology, art, history, and philosophy.
Fuller's biographers provide substantial anecdotal evidence to back up James Freeman's
Clark's claim that Fuller had a singular ability to instill in other people an awareness
of the unique potential for growth they harbored within themselves.
And to urge them with her words and her personal love to bring that inner greatness out
into the world, she was midwife to many souls and in true socratic fashion, she loved
her students individually.
Meghan Marshall's biography is what you call an empathetic biography, identifying with
the subject, and in her empathetic biography, Marshall analyzes the subterranean tensions
that Mark Fuller's friendship with Emerson.
And there's no question that Emerson admired Fuller greatly.
He wrote of her, and I quote, "I can remember no superior woman, but thought of
sieras, Minerva, prosopine, and the august ideal forms of the four world."
Likewise, there's no doubting Fuller's personal intellectual allegiance to him, despite
her frustrations with his emotional withholding and inability to give himself openly.
In any case, committed and grateful to Emerson, Fuller worked tirelessly at the editor
of the Transcendentalist Journal of the Dial, the most original and free-spirited Journal
of its time.
From 1840 to 1843, she contributed some of its most interesting pieces, including an article
she later expanded into the book that became the cornerstone of her intellectual legacy
woman in the 19th century.
There's considerable debate about whether Margaret Fuller was in fact a transcendentalist.
And claims that transcendentalism was pertinent to only one stage of her evolution.
Marshall is more or less neutral on the issue.
I believe that Margaret Fuller was a sui-generous transcendentalist for most of her adult
life and that a distinctly transcendentalist doctrine underlies her lifelong advocacy of
self-cultivation, as well as her later advocacy of women's rights, social reform,
prison reform above all, and the 1848 revolutions in Europe.
Consider the title of the article that subsequently became woman in the 19th century.
The original title was The Great Lawsuit Man vs. Men, Woman vs. Women.
In her preface to the published book Fuller wrote, "I meant by that title to
make the fact that, while it is the destiny of man in the course of the ages to ascertain
and fulfil the law of his being, so that his life shall be seen as a whole to be that
of an angel or messenger.
The action of prejudices and passions is continually obstructing the holy work that is
to make the earth a part of heaven."
Heaven here means something along the lines of what Emerson describing the oversold
called, "that unity within which every man's particular being is contained."
Fuller had declared in one of her conversations that we reach heaven by transcending,
quote, "the painful sense of the inadequacy of our nature to the point that there would
be no above or below but a sense of the fullness of being."
Elizabeth Peabody, who hosted Fuller's conversations in the West Street bookstore at her
home in Boston, noted what Fuller went on to affirm on that occasion.
Elizabeth Peabody.
Right.
Fuller said that, "in the possibilities of her being was the loss of all imperfection and
that the attainment of a divine nature was the faith that reconciled her to this human
nature as the pedestal of that divine nature.
Only in this view of human nature as the pedestal of a divine could she tolerate
at all."
Virtually all of the New England transcendentalists bought into William L.
L.R.
Channing's gospel of self-culture, as he called it.
Channing preached that if an individual, quote, "does what he can do to unfold all his
powers and capacities, especially his nobler ones, he practices self-culture."
Fuller was no exception.
As her friend Clark observed, her lifelong aim from first to last was self-culture.
Yet, while most other transcendentalists kept their focus on individual spiritual growth,
Fuller came to understand self-culture much more expansively as the gradual self-perfection
and divination of all of humanity.
For Fuller, the self, in self-culture, was at once individual and communal, spiritual and
social, historical, and transcendental.
Hence, the difference between man and men in her title.
Man stands for the luminous ideal, that transcendent fullness of being, which history, when
it heeds its higher calling strives to realize on earth through the self-culture of humanity
as a whole.
This man is neither male nor female, but a union of the inner essence of both genders.
Quote, "By man I mean both man and woman.
These are the two halves of one thought, twin exponents of a divine thought."
Fuller grounds her impassioned appeal for social, economic, and legal equality for women
on this exalted philosophical premise.
Time and again in woman in the 19th century she asserts that while men made lord over
women in the defective world of empirical reality, man and woman figure as equals in their
metaphysical essence, precisely because they are two halves of one thought.
By subjugating women, men subjugate a part of themselves and thereby obstruct their own
personal, as well as humankind's general, aspiration to God.
Coming to Fuller's transcendental principle, where women are shackled, men cannot be free.
Quote, "O wretched men, your sin is your own punishment.
You have lost the world in losing yourselves."
The fundamental truth about the inner spiritual kinship of the sexes has been long obscured,
by a plain Fuller because, quote, "man misunderstood and abused his natural advantages,
becoming woman's temporal master rather than her spiritual sire."
Continue quoting, "He educated woman more as a servant than as a daughter and found himself
a king without a queen."
That makes me think that Fuller could easily have authored the Jimi Hendrix verse somewhere
a queen is weeping, somewhere a king has no wife from the Windcries Mary.
Fuller argued that despite its obfuscation, the deeper unity of the sexes allows itself
to be glimpse both in art and in instances of pure love and in fact, woman in the 19th
century marshals of prodigious quantity of examples, really prodigious historical literary and
mythological to boost Fuller's claim that men, quote, "especially share and need the feminine
principle and that divine birds need to be brooted into life and song by mothers."
Men have always been, quote, "taught to learn their rule from without."
Yet the time has come, again, quoting, "to unfold it from within."
Fuller puts it best at the end of her book, quote, "I have urged upon the female sex self-subsistence
in its two forms of self-reliance and self-impose because I believe them to be the needed
means of the present juncture.
I have urged on woman independence of man not that I do not think the sexes mutually
needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion
which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it
should be to itself or to the other.
I wish woman to live first for God's sake, then she will not make an imperfect man her God
and thus sink to idolatry.
By being more a soul, she will not be less a woman for nature is perfected through spirit."
Now Fuller's metaphysics of the sexes, as I've outlined it, calls for two remarks.
First, securing equal rights for women in the domestic social and political spheres was not
for Fuller an end unto itself.
The end was spiritual and transcendental.
She understood equal rights as merely preconditions for female autonomy, putting women
in a position to begin to unfold from within their self-cultivation.
She cared less about what they might choose to do with their freedom in one of the more famous
lines of women in the 19th century.
She writes, "Let them be sea captains, if you will."
So she cared less about what they might choose to do with their freedom and more about
how they might transmute their freedom into spirit.
In short, the question of whether we should live like baboons or men to quote the row would
not be answered by the attainment of rights.
Even with full rights, one can still live like a baboon.
My second remark is that we are woefully deceived if we believe that woman in the 19th
century has lost its historical pertinence.
But Fuller wrote over a century and a half ago about female bondage still holds true today
for the vast majority of women around the world.
Indeed there is every reason to expect that the 21st century will explode into a series
of aggravated wars over women's servitude to their brothers, husbands, fathers, pimps,
and paymasters.
And the men would fight to perpetuate such servitude would do well to take stock of
Fuller's admonishment, "Your sin is your own punishment."
Woman in the 19th century contains a basic truth that continues to get obscured, namely
that societies that stifle women's freedoms make men sick and miserable.
One in the 19th century is a book of a imagined dialogue with great women of the past and
the present real and fictional alike.
It's full of deities, priestesses, seers, muses, and heroines throughout the pages, called
from hymns, ballads, legends, novels, and poems of the European as well as ancient traditions,
classical traditions above all.
It's only by letting them speak through history and tradition that we can see the buried
truth of the proper place of woman alongside man in achieving and reconciling what Fuller
calls the radical dualism of which humanity partakes and in which it consists.
And in America in particular she sees a land that "must pay back its debt to woman without
whose aid it would not have been brought into alliance with the civilized world."
And here she's referring to Isabella's having furnished Columbus with the meaning of discovering
it.
So I'm just going to quote a few passages from woman in the 19th century.
And I want to thank Dylan Montanari, managing producer who is also my assistant for having
brought many of these passages to my attention because I asked him to help me out and
he brought some of these passages to my attention for them just going to read them.
It's in Margaret Fuller's voice.
Meanwhile not a few believe and men themselves have expressed the opinion that the time
has come when your ridiscie is to call for an orpheus rather than orpheus for your
ridiscie.
But the idea of man, however imperfectly brought out, has been far more than that of woman,
that she, the other half of the same thought, the other chamber of the heart of life,
needs now to take her turn in the full pulsation.
And that improvement in the daughters will best aid in the reformation of the sons of this age.
And man born to purify and animate the unintelligent and cold can in his madness degrade
and pollute no less the fair and the chaste.
And if men are deaf, the angels hear.
Another quote, "A house is no home unless it contained food and fire for the mind as well
as for the body."
The female Greek of our day is as much in the street as the male to cry what news.
We doubt not that it was the same in Athens of old, the women shut out from the marketplace
made up for it at the religious festivals, for human beings are not so constituted that
they can live without expansion.
If they do not get it one way, they must another or perish.
We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of
the former ages and that no discordant collision but a ravishing harmony of the spheres would
ensue.
Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom despite impediments, but there
should be encouragement and a free, genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort, fair
play for each in its own kind, some are like the little delicate flowers which love to hide
in the dripping mosses by the sides of mountain torrents or in the shade of tall trees,
but others require an open field, a rich and loose in soil so they never show their proper
or they never show their proper hues.
You cannot believe it men but the only reason why women ever assume what is more appropriate
to you is because you prevent them from finding out what is fit for themselves, were they
free, were they wise fully to develop the strength and beauty of woman, they would never
wish to be men or manlike.
The well-instructed moon flies not from her orbit to seize on the glories of her partner,
no, for she knows that one law rules one heaven contains one universe replies to them
alike.
Saints and geniuses have often chosen a lonely position in the faith that if undisturbed
by the pressure of near ties, they would give themselves up to the inspiring spirit, they
would enable them to understand and reproduce life better than actual experience could.
Now in 1846 Fuller left for Europe as the first foreign correspondent for an American newspaper,
she traveled to England, France and Italy met a number of luminaries there, Carlisle, for
example, Wordsworth and George Sande, yet no one impressed her more than the Italian revolutionary
Giuseppe Mazzini, whom she called by far the most beauty person I have seen, one in whom
Holiness has purified but nowhere dwarf the man.
She met Mazzini in London where he was in exile due to his revolutionary militancy in Italy,
and later after meeting him in London, she would devote herself wholeheartedly to Mazzini's
cause in Italy.
Now regarding Italy from a very young age, Fuller had a special kinship with Italian culture.
She taught herself Italian so that she could read Dante, Petriar, Adyosto and Tasso.
If you were a professor today, she may well be a professor of Italian literature.
And so when she arrives in Italy in 1847, she writes, "Itily receives me as a long-lost
child and I feel myself at home here."
She spent the last three years of her life in Italy, mostly in Rome, which she had idealized
to a considerable degree actually in her autobiographical romance, declaring, "in vain for
me are men more if they are less than Romans."
In any case, when you got to Rome, that city did not disappoint her.
In fact, the city took her in as one of its own and I mentioned to you the memorial
plaque in Cambridge that was erected after her death by other people.
That claims that by birth she was a New Englander, but by adoption, a city of citizen
of Rome.
Now the two biographers, you know, Madison and Marshall, choose to emphasize different
aspects of Fuller's life in Rome, yet both of them provide quite vivid in-depth accounts
of those thrilling and tumultuous years and they really were amazing years.
It was there, by the way, that Fuller met this Marquez de Giovanni Ossobi.
Ten years are junior.
She ended up marrying him after giving birth to their child in 1848.
It's true that no marriage certificate has ever been uncovered and some people still
doubt whether they actually ever formally got married, but most people believe that they
did have some kind of marriage ceremony in 1848 quietly there in Rome after she had given birth
to their child Angelina.
In any case, it was in Rome that she took charge of an entire hospital.
This hospital is on the Isola Tibadina, the Osbidale, the Fattiebe, Beniflatelli is still there
in Rome today.
And you can visit it, still functional, actually.
And she actually took charge of this hospital to ten the wounds of those who like her husband
fought in the streets on behalf of the Republican cause.
Ossobi was part of the Republican Guard.
And it was there in Rome that she wrote her finest articles for Horace Creeley's New York
Tribune and it was there as the French troops laid siege to Rome and snuffed out the
revolution that she saw for herself how mercilessly just causes can be crushed.
In her dispatches from Europe, if you read them, a full-throated, fuller exhorted her readers
back home to support the popular uprisings that swept through much of Europe in 1848.
And with the same romantic idealism that she brought to her advocacy for women's rights
and prison reform, she enlarged the very idea of America insisting that the United States
was but an imperfect approximation of that idea of America.
The great moral law that underlies the founding of the American Republic, namely freedom
and equality for all applies to all nations or so she claimed as she urged her readers
back home to recognize in the events of 1848 an American battle being fought across the Atlantic.
And as the scholar and biographer Shivi Nye wrote, Fuller hoped to quote, "repaint
the American project by showing that the essence of America is to be found in Europe."
Few of her countrymen to say the least responded to her appeal and that too is a sorry
reality of America.
Now the shipwreck that caused Margaret Fuller and her family to perish, a few hundred yards
off the shore of fire island was a tragic event.
Her body was never found, nor was the body of her husband, nor was the manuscript of her
book on the Italian Revolution which she had been writing for the past two or three years,
which by all reports would have been her real Magnus Opus.
According to the ship's cook who ended up saving himself, Fuller's final words on
that boat as she just hung onto the mast refusing to take the plunge is, "We're, I see nothing
but death before me.
I shall never reach the shore."
In his four quartets T.S. Eliot wrote, quote, "What might have been is an abstraction
of the painting of perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation."
While this is true, two things seem fairly certain.
Had this absurd misfortune not brought her life to an abrupt end, Fuller's self-culture
would have taken many compelling new forms.
And by the same token, and this is the second certainty, she would have seen up close how
provincial, prejudiced, and petty some of her fellow new Englanders could be.
Many could not countenance the fact that she had married an Italian Catholic, or that
as a woman she had presumed to defy convention, make her voice heard, or Hector her
countryman in print.
In the novel I mentioned earlier, Miss Fuller, April Bernard gets it exactly right that
at the news of the wreck, quote, "There had been an unspoken, shadowy satisfaction among
some of Fuller's friends back at home.
It was the feeling that this had served her right."
Even Fuller's bosom friend Sophia Peabody confessed, "I am really glad Margaret died."
Once she would have found, quote, "No peace or rest back in America, having married, quote,
a person so wanting in force and availability.
Wanting in force and availability is in reference to her husband Giovanni Ossody, who
did not speak English."
And Sophia confided in her sister Mary, quote, "I hate reform women.
I think it is designed by God that woman should always spiritually wear a veil and not
a coat and hat."
Earlier when woman in the 19th century was published, Sophia remarked that unless, quote,
she were truly married, Margaret had no business pontificating about marriage.
Now, as for Sophia Peabody's husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne, he wrote that it was providence
that had put Fuller on that damned ship to save her from further ridicule.
This from the same person who, while Fuller was alive, professed great friendship and admiration
for her, but who, after her death and after he ransacked the character Margaret Fuller
in his fiction, based a number of his characters on her, wrote for the record that she
had, quote, "a strong, heavy, unplayable, and in many respects defective and evil nature."
And this, from the most overestimated writer in the American canon, it seems that Hawthorne
could not forgive Fuller for not being more like his beloved wife, Sophia.
Hawthorne will no doubt remain an interesting relic of his age and live on in the provincial
gloom of English departments. Yet Margaret Fuller, as far more than a relic, it can be set
of her today what she herself had set of Giuseppe Matsini, that he was, quote, "a man to whom
only the next age can do justice as it reaps the harvest of the seed he has sewn in this."
There is still much harvest to reap from the seed's Margaret Fuller has sewn, and I'll let that
serve as my closing line today, that indeed there is still much harvest to reap from the seed's
Margaret Fuller has sewn. This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
[Music]