Margaret Fuller Quotes

“Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate was this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge,” but never to experience full communion with another being. The prospect “envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“and fueled their mutual passion for the great Romantic texts—Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Novalis’s Hymns to the Night—which featured protagonists suffering in equal measure from lost loves and undirected ambition.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Margaret’s unfocused striving and rankling frustration over family obligations found answering chords in Goethe’s Romanticism. She began, and hoped to publish, a translation of his play Torquato Tasso, based on the life of an Italian Renaissance poet whose close confidante, an unmarried, intellectually gifted princess, complains of feeling stifled in her gilded cage. Margaret was captivated as well by his novel Elective Affinities, which put into fictional play Goethe’s view, borrowed from new science, that romantic attractions resulted from unalterable chemical “affinities” and should be obeyed regardless of marital ties.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who followed her path to the Continent several years after her death, undertook an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing stories in favor of longer narratives. He preferred to call his books “Romances,” not novels. “When a writer calls his work a Romance,” Hawthorne explained in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, “he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.” The novelist, in Hawthorne’s terms, aims to achieve “a very minute fidelity” to experience, whereas the author of a romance may “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture” while still maintaining strict allegiance to “the truth of the human heart.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Here in Rome, “men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood.” She had found in Italy “a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made” in America, the now stagnant and degraded “new” world.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men.” She had instead worked for a living and reaped the “fruits of spiritual knowledge” these past ten years, seeking common cause with the laborer, the immigrant, the prostitute.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic affection, for connections or covenants that dwelled only in “the higher emotions,” marked her as “undeveloped”—a notion that Margaret, with her credo of self-expansion, could scarcely tolerate.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,” but added to these a “religious” dimension, “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” Margaret was careful to specify that by “religion” she meant “the thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma.” She also had in mind a particular style of devotion: a “reverent love,” a sense that one’s partner is the “only true” companion, the only other one “of all human beings” who can “understand and interpret . . . my inner and outer being.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals,”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary was now. Margaret felt this too; it was why she thought she would make a better man than he. And why she rarely looked at men “with common womanly eyes,” as she once wrote to George Davis, but rather with an eye to friendship—yet on her own more womanly terms. If Waldo wished she would befriend him as a brother, she willed him to befriend her as a sister. The disjunction perplexed and saddened them both.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Even more distasteful to him was the way he saw Margaret and other women conversing with each other as they gathered in his parlor: no sooner had the “stricken soul” confessed her woes than her companion “in return . . . disburdens into her ear the story of her misery, as deep & hopeless as her own.” Such an exchange was about as far from the ideal of friendship Waldo espoused as could be imagined, yet it was what Margaret sought from him—a connection through mutual understanding and sympathy—and that, at times, unwilling as he was to admit it, Waldo coveted for himself. For Margaret knew Waldo suffered too, though he presented a “cold pedantic self” to his parlor guests or argued for a Dial “measuring no hours but those of sunshine.” After age thirty, “a man wakes up sad every morning,” he had written in his journal, for no one else to read; but Margaret sensed his melancholy.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“material for her book. Despite the restrictive laws on women and children in the Papal States, Margaret had experienced more freedom of opportunity, both professionally and personally, in Rome than in New England or New York. And now she had a family, a child whose “little heart clings to mine” and a husband whose companionship, Margaret wrote to her sister, Ellen, is “an inestimable blessing.” Giovanni had remained loyal when she was “more sick, desponding and unreasonable in many ways than I ever was before,” and he had cheered and sustained her with “the sacred love, the love passing that of women.” “In him,” Margaret wrote to her mother, “I have found a home.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Nino—a “fine healthy girl” with “two children already at the Foundling Hospital,” yet who, to Margaret’s frustration, was “always trying not to give him milk, for fear of spoiling the shape of her bosom!”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“late transformed “the bosom of woman” from a “home of angelic pity” into “a shrine for offerings to moloch.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Spending the last night of the Roman Republic with Giovanni, making no secret of their connection among his comrades, may have helped Margaret begin to frame the revelations she would soon make to friends and family—“I have united my destiny with that of an obscure young man,” she began one of them. The morning after that surprisingly peaceful night on the Pincian Hill came the assembly vote to surrender, and with it the imperative for republican soldiers to evacuate the city. Giovanni could no longer safely lead a separate life in Rome.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“perish, lest a foe should level his musket from their shelter.” Margaret pitied Mazzini as the leader of the republic’s desperate stand: “to me it would be so dreadful to cause all this bloodshed, to dig the graves of such martyrs . . . I could not, could not!”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“It was when she thought about Nino that Margaret lost her courage, “became a coward”: “It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least for ourselves.” At night she “imagined every thing.” Perhaps Nino would be killed by troops massing outside the city, as she had heard the Croatian soldiers fighting for Austria in Lombardy had massacred babies; they might set fire to Chiara’s house and Margaret would not be there to save him. Giovanni could be killed in the fighting; Margaret herself might not survive the French assault. What would become of Nino then? Since Nino’s birth, “my heart is bound to earth as never before.” But she could not leave, she “could not see my little boy.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“like the French, with their guillotines of the past century, their bloody “June Days” of last summer. Mazzini would negotiate with the French; he had already secured a temporary armistice. Besides, Garibaldi was needed to defend against King Ferdinand’s Neapolitan army, which crossed the border into the Papal States at Frascati as soon as the French withdrew.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“residence in Rome. Soon the unthinkable was happening, as Margaret exclaimed in a May 6 column for the Tribune—“the soldiers of republican France, firing upon republican Rome!”—firing on St. Peter’s, their cannonballs directly striking the Vatican.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“expected attack. On the morning of April 30, “Margherita Fuller” was named “Regolatrice” of the most ancient of Rome’s hospitals, the Fate Bene Fratelli on Tiber Island, and requested to report there by noon “if the alarm bell does not ring before.” She would be responsible for organizing the schedules of female nursing volunteers in order to staff the hospital “night and day,” as well as for attending at the bedsides of the wounded herself.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“thousand men to regain the city for the pope. The French battalion took up a position thirty-five miles from Rome on the coast at Civitavecchia, flying the tricolor flags of both France and Italy, a deliberate ruse.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“but the “crisis is tremendous.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“broke down. Mazzini stayed with Margaret for two hours that night, and “we talked, though rapidly, of everything.” Margaret confided her own “new, strange sufferings,” as she had to Mickiewicz. Mazzini promised to return as often as possible,”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Margaret had begun to worry that “people in U.S. are fast forgetting me,” but her interest in the New Englanders who had once made up her “large and brilliant circle” was waning too. “O Jamie,” she responded. “What come back for?” Certainly not for “Brownson [and] Alcott and other rusty fusty intel. and spiritual-ities.” Here in Rome, “men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood.” She had found in Italy “a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made” in America, the now stagnant and degraded “new” world.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“Reflecting on the rapid series of events, Margaret wrote to her American readers, “The revolution, like all genuine ones, has been instinctive, its results unexpected and surprising to the greater part of those who achieved them.” In a subsequent session, the assembly voted to call Mazzini to Rome, where he would soon become the most powerful of three triumvirs selected to lead the young republic through its infancy, as the new government prepared to implement a program of drastic reform. A punitive tax on flour would be repealed, a national railway system constructed, church properties claimed for inexpensive housing, and papal lands outside Rome divided among the contadini (Italy’s peasant class).”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“decades before. Garibaldi had spent his own twenty-year exile in South America, first joining gaucho rebels in Brazil and then raising an “Italian legion” to fight in the Uruguayan civil war; he’d brought sixty of his most loyal soldiers, the core of his highly skilled regiment, back with him to Europe.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“killed,” Margaret wrote in the Tribune; no one paid the council any attention. The way was clear for the meeting of the Constitutional Assembly, and in early February representatives from all over Italy began to fill the hotels in Rome, so recently abandoned by “the Murray guide book mob.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“and teeth ached, but could she trust a midwife’s assurance that this too was natural, common? “According to these women, one must think that this condition is really a martyrdom,” Margaret wrote to her young lover, a boy almost, who had never tended a baby, whose mother had died when he was six, leaving him, her youngest child, unfamiliar with the “ailment” of a woman’s pregnancy. Margaret cried after receiving letters from her family begging her to come home, knowing that she could provide only vague descriptions of her whereabouts, pretend to enjoy “hid[ing] thus in Italy,” like the “great Goethe.” She experienced “fits of deep longing to see persons and objects in America” and once again felt “I have no ‘home,’ no peaceful room to which I can return and repose in the love of my kindred from the friction of care and the world.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“convey to her family in America if she did not survive the summer. Margaret asked that he “say to those I leave behind that I was willing to die” and that “I have wished to be natural and true.” But “the world was not in harmony with me—nothing came right for me.” She was not without hope for a better life, but Margaret placed her faith in “the spirit that governs the Universe” to “reserve for me a sphere” in that supersensuous ether of the afterworld “where I can develope more freely, and be happier.” She had little expectation that her “forces” would sustain her long enough to find that “better path” on earth.”
― Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life