Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 1: The Private Years

Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life #1

by Charles Capper

With this first volume of a two-part biography of the Transcendentalist critic and feminist leader, Margaret Fuller, Capper has launched the premier modern biography of early America's best-known intellectual woman. Based on a thorough examination of all the firsthand sources, many of them never before used, this volume is filled with original portraits of Fuller's numerous friends and colleagues and the influential movements that enveloped them. Writing with a strong narrative sweep, Capper focuses on the central problem of Fuller's life--her identity as a female intellectual--and presents the first biography of Fuller to do full justice to its engrossing subject. This first volume chronicles Fuller's "private years": her gradual, tangled, but fascinating emergence out of the "private" life of family, study, Boston-Cambridge socializing, and anonymous magazine-writing, to the beginnings of her rebirth as antebellum America's female prophet-critic.
Capper's biography is at once an evocative portrayal of an extraordinary woman and a comprehensive study of an avant-garde American intellectual type at the beginning of its first creation.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction

456 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

From my perspective Capper's first volume is a highly successful example of masterful narrative technique and superb characterization.

His book also suggests to me that these achievements, although necessary, are not sufficient for successful biography. The biographer must also bring to his consideration of his subject theoretical/clinical knowledge - of a scope and level of detail that I can't define today - of the psychological/emotional development of the sort of person whose life he is attempting to capture on paper, in however limited a fashion surviving sources permit.

Page 172 of Capper's first volume illustrates this point better than any other example I can recall. On that one page, Capper tells of Fuller's response to her father's death, who must have been, apart from my own mother, as monsterously abusive - verbally, emotionally, psychologically - and controlling a parent as any who ever walked the Earth. Her mother was a non-entity, as one would expect, so papa was the only game in town. On p. 172, Capper presents the following bits of information: (1) Fuller's suicidal longing for death by drowning ("the maternal, womb- and tomblike temptations of water"), (2) Fuller's relentless "self-flaggelation," continuing her father's remorseless, hyper-critical abuse of his daughter, (3) Fuller's formation of plans and initial progress in a highly challenging and absorbing intellectual project - a critical account of the life and work of Goethe, and (4) Fuller's undermining of her plan and resolve citing the need totally and "absolutely to re-educate myself." ("It seems as if I had been very arrogant to dare to think it.") All on one page - and yet Capper treats this material as if they were disjointed facts connected merely by meaningless temporal coincidence.

Now I am beginning to understand the dynamic that propelled Fuller's vaunted self-willed transformations (Capper and Matteson) - which were nothing of the sort. She becomes - as a child - a prodigy of erudition - exactly what her father intended to make of her, without, of course, ever acknowledging her gifts and achievements. Nothing she ever could do measured up. Once she reached adolescence and puberty, that child prodigy of erudition suddenly became in her father's eyes a freak of erudition - and a highly unattractive young woman at that: tall, overweight, blemished of skin, rather plain, but arrogant and highly opinionated, etc., etc. ("as disagreeable as forty Fullers" - Thomas Wentworth Higginson.) So now Margaret must become a conventional, accomplished young lady - or else her prospects for an advantageous marriage will be nil! Yet more hyper-citicism followed - with Margaret's attempt to "re-invent" herself to please someone who could never be pleased - her father and now her own battered self. All the more painful, because Timothy Fuller had evoked in her the highest joy she would ever experience - the development of her greatest gifts, which then become a source of unremitting and merciless torment. So she experiences episodes of profound depression - who wouldn't? She defends herself by distraction, attempting to displace despair with frenzied reading, thinking, speculating, writing, socializing, all of which draws further critical comment. At some point her agitation and frenzy becomes intolerable, and she experiences a break of sort. Her mind actually shuts down. She is literally unable to process sensory experience, to connect one thought with another. She realizes that something has to change - and so after she recovers from the fatigue that followed her break, she adjusts her perspective bit by bit - to resume the cycle. Having internalized her father's voice - the cycle resumes whether he's alive or dead.

And there it all is on p. 172 - the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. Yet Capper treats this material as if he were transcribing a grocery list that he found among her papers.

I'm left to wonder how this is possible. The only explanation that I can formulate right now is that Capper (1) is/was an associate professor of history at the time he wrote this volume, (2) is/was entirely unequipped to assess or interpret the information he had assembled into an temporally ordered chronicle - unequipped by training, personal experience, reading/research, even interest perhaps. I can say as much for Matteson.

Let me add that I don't necessarily expect this sort of analysis of a biographer, but I also don't want to read sentences such as, "She was on her way to transforming herself from a bookish adolescent to an intellectual with a mission." (p. 114), without some description/account of the engine of transformation. Nor do I want to read for the very first time, with no preparation whatever, a sentence of the kind that appears on p. 160, regarding "the recurrent states of depression into which she invariably plunged for many years after her father's death," or quotes from Fuller's journal such as "I constantly looked forward to death." without explanation of antecedents. These are highly significant biographical facts - unpleasant, perhaps, but facts nonetheless. And if a biographer isn't equipped to deal with facts of this kind, he should choose another subject, whose biography he is equipped or is willing to become equipped to narrate and interpret.

But I will continue reading this beautifully written biography of Fuller, both volumes, of whom he presents brilliant characterizations.

After page 250.
Capper missed a second cycle of depression in 1837-8, an account that begins on page 237 and extends through page 250. It's all there again. The despair, followed by the "frenzy," followed by the break, followed by a renewal of religious faith and the continuing fatigue, migranes and hopelessness, the recovery - which this time includes a change of jobs and residence - the well-known "geographical" solution, which is no solution at all but a temporary palliative. And again, Capper does not make the connections. (And no, Dr. Matteson, this was no self-willed transformation.)

So it seems to me (right now, today, at this moment) that Margaret Fuller's next biographer, should he/she choose to extend - rather than repeat - what we know about Fuller, will have to learn/know a great deal about depression, childhood depression in particular, about the many ways in which children manifest and experience depression, how untreated depression in childhood continues - and presumably - changes in the sufferer's adolescence and adulthood, and so on. The full life cycle of that disorder seems to be on display in full regalia over Fuller's life.

I'm wondering, in particular, how often the word "frenzy" appears in her correspondence and in her journals. That word is certainly conspicuous in Capper's biography by its frequency in the passages that Capper quotes. And so Fuller's next biographer should become very familiar with the diagnostic literature regarding agitated depression in children, adolescents and adults - a variety that seems to have plagued Fuller specifically.

"I am most seriously displeased" (Thank you, Jane Austin, for one of my favorite phrases.) with one of Capper's claims that in his pages he has adduced evidence that "explodes" altogether the myth of Timothy Fuller's abuse of his daughter. While documenting that abuse in abundant detail, Capper is sufficiently callous to conclude that the Honorable Mr. Fuller wasn't abusive at all but merely "hardening" his daughter's mind (at age eight to ten) - whatever that may mean - and even worse - that Mr. Fuller's methods would be "acceptable" if he had interlarded now and again his critical observations of her with merited praise. (See pages 34-7, which in my copy appear after p. 212.) WHAT?! "Acceptable"? To whom? Where? When? For what reasons? Acceptable how exactly? The answer - acceptable to HIMSELF for reasons that he doesn't state. And the book appeared in 1992! After all Philip Greven has published "The Protestant Temperament" in the late 1970s (to great fanfare and much acclaim) - if I recall correctly. Clearly the man, Capper that is, was/is as thick as a plank - as we once said in east Texas.

But all my righteous indignation (and experience of intense self-satisfaction) notwithstanding (Thank you very much, Dr. Capper.) - his portrait and characterization of Fuller is perfectly splendid. But I can hardly contain my impatience with the nearly complete absence of understanding of the person, whose biography he claims to have written.

After page 300.
I added two quotes that reveal absolutely stunning episodes of grandiosity. And I'm stuck that Capper makes no connections whatever - apart from the annoyance, impatience and incredulity that Fuller's comments induced in certain of her contemporaries.

1. Ralph W. Emerson recorded the following comment that Fuller made to him: "that she had seen all the people worth seeing in America, & was satisfied that there was no intellect comparable to her own." (p. 264)

2. "I have touched the secret of the universe, and by that touch was invested with talismanic power which has never left me, though it sometimes lies dormant for a long while." (p. 273)

Perry Miller evaluated the first of these comments as simple truth-telling. Capper doesn't report Miller's evaluation of the second, which borders, to my mind, on the pathological - if such mental states can be said to exist at all.

Actually I've had rather enough of this review. It's becoming repetive and tiresome - to write, certainly, and to read, most likely.

[Carol Keefer]

I wish all of Charles Capper's books about Margaret Fuller had been written when I grew up. All i learned of my German heritage was the beauty of sound with musical notes and words as my only tools so I express beauty with piano and poetry. It seems like the only career path for Margaret Fuller was as translator, editor, and journalist. I may have gone into journalism if I had know the life and works of Margaret Fuller as a child.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fuller is an intriguing historical figure, worth spending time with. Capper's book delves deeply into her intellectual development, yet this book - (the first of two volumes) - is a time investment and not always easy to read.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating story. but long, so long. and, 2 volumes.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most insightful biography's I have ever read. Simply, a must read.