Rewriting the life of an “ultra-radical”: Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)

Abstract

This thesis focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s portrait of Margaret Fuller in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). More specifically, it centres on the chapters “IV. Visits to Concord” and “V. Conversations in Boston,” both written by Emerson. The main hypothesis of this project is that Emerson’s portrayal of Fuller in Memoirs constitutes a step back in his career as a reformist; reading Memoirs as Emerson’s first public statement on women’s rights, I explore the limitations of his understanding of womanhood while comparing it with Fuller’s views on the subject. In order to compensate for the corrupt and mediated nature of the biography, I read Emerson’s sections in Memoirs alongside other writings by him and by Fuller—in doing so, I provide analyses of unpublished material, but I also focus on writings that have often been overlooked in scholarly studies. I also look at works by William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke (Emerson’s two co-authors), and Sophia Ripley.

My research aims have been to answer the following questions: (1) how did Emerson’s and Fuller’s different understandings of womanhood impact their views of society and the American nation? And (2) how can Memoirs inform our understanding of Emerson’s stance in relation to the women’s rights movement, of which he was a very timid and ambiguous supporter? The first chapter centres on Fuller and Emerson’s conversations on womanhood: reflecting on their different understandings of such a term, I show how gender was a problem that both animated many of their exchanges and troubled their friendship. I compare Emerson’s commentary on his friendship with Fuller in Memoirs with her take on friendship in her review of Die Günderode (published in the Dial in 1842). I then turn to Sophia Ripley’s Dial article “Woman” (1841) to show how other Transcendentalists were also part of that conversation on women’s rights.

In Chapters Two and Three, I further reflect on Emerson’s rewriting of Fuller’s life in Memoirs. Focusing on Emerson’s problematic commentary on Fuller’s career, I examine his silencing of her most radical works as well as his criticism of her writing. I highlight the aspects of her career that he purposefully left out of the biography and examine his dislike of her writing focusing, in particular, on the accusation that Fuller “often loses herself in sentimentalism.” In the third and final chapter of this thesis, I reflect on the notion of “embodiment” in order to demonstrate how female physicality represented an obstacle for Emerson. I argue that this is visible in Memoirs, in which his distaste for Fuller’s inclinations towards mesmerism and her faith in bodily intuition is apparent. I demonstrate that the same doubts which transpire from Emerson’s portrait of Fuller in Memoirs also inhabit his subsequent lectures on women’s rights