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Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life #2
Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In Volume II, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to
many others.
many others.
672 pages, Hardcover
First published May 9, 2007
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August 11, 2013
After p. 175
In volume 2 of his biography Capper missed Fuller's third cycle of severe major depression, with psychotic features, that came upon that pitiable individual in 1840-1. This is not to say that he didn't insert related quotes and excerpts from Fuller's journal and letters as well as the observations of other persons, Emerson, most notably. He did, of course. Otherwise we would have no idea that it occurred.
He also missed the events in Fuller's inner life that led to the resolution of whatever conflicts had propelled these cycles/episodes in the first place. He notes the ending of this last cycle, and provides the relevant quotes of the "serenity" that Fuller experienced after a period of recovery - and for the remainder of her short life. But he doesn't explore this event of central importance in Fuller's biography. Not that she wouldn't have carried on even in the midst of continuing cycles of depression and recovery - she had in the past. But after 1840-41 she could proceed without interruption - and the torture of severe major depression.
I've witnessed recovery of this kind. So I know it can happen among particularly intelligent, introspective and self-honest persons, who decide that whatever plagues them is simply "not worth" the pain, and there is a sincere letting go of whatever it is (in a moment when life and death actually hangs in the balance), and the tortured self enters upon an inner life, much less vulnerable to depressive cycles than heretofore and to depression, when it occurs, much less severe and of much shorter duration, much more within the range of normal, than in earlier years.
Capper reports all of these events, but he doesn't organize this material into a narrative of its own and to integrate this narrative into a larger account of Fuller's life.
My reading, so far, is that Fuller had to stringently compartment her life in order to cope with depression. She seems to have established very strong boundaries among these compartments, of which, by my count, there were four: (1) her intellectual life - public and private, (2) her tormented, then not so tormented, emotional life, (3) her life as a member of a nuclear family, first her family of origin and then the family she established with a husband and child of he own, and (4) her social life that involved relationships with masses, literally hundreds, of friends and acquaintances.
So I hope to read a biography of Fuller - one day - that (1) takes Fuller's abuse in childbood and the resulting depression as a point of departure, (2) traces her development of a compartmented existence that sequestered her depression, as it were, and allowed her to develop her gifts in other domains of life, (3) delineates the interactions among these domains, (4) follows her development in each domain of her life (and their evolving interactions) so long as her depression led to disabling breaks, (5) describes how this coping mechanism and defense of self changed once the original reason for this particular organization of her life disappeared - or became much less powerful in her life - and (6) finally her development of a new organization of self and life after depression lost its power. On this last phase, I'm not so sure because I've only read through page 175 - with 375 pages yet to read.
I do admire Capper's work tremendously and sincerely. Without the product of his decades of labor, none of us would have the insights into Fuller that we now have, and she could not claim the indelible presence in our minds that she now possesses.
After p. 200.
It seems to me that a future biographer of Fuller could also detail the recovery process that followed her depressive breaks. Fuller's self was remarkably resourceful and tenacious in defending itself even while the compartments that she had established to sequester/segregate depression collapsed (temporarily) during a break. In those intervals - as Capper documents abundantly, Fuller's self escaped from a compartmented existence altogether into a mystical/transcendent realm. The evidence includes the numerous statements she recorded of her having "touched the secret of the universe" and thereby acquired "talismanic powers" and similar descriptions of her super-human powers, which revived in her from time to time. They did, as Capper describes, and their revival coincided with her periods of recovery from depressive states. Her episode of 1840-41 (following the Sam Ward kerfuffle) preceded months during which she claimed in her journal to possess special powers over other minds, whom she could manipulate/control at will. Some she could, Caroline Sturgis, for example - but only so long as Carolyn, an impulsive and extraordinarily wealthy woman, found it amusing to participate in Fuller's performance.
After p. 300
I really must put Margaret Fuller aside for a bit. After 900-1000 pages of the Divine Miss M. - I can't take it anymore, as in "Back off, Peggy, and lighten up!" - for a while. But before I forget, I want to make note of several very interesting statements of Fuller and Capper that allow us to form a tentative sense of the final segment of the trajectory of her inner life.
On p 208, Capper writes: "These new methods of emancipating our wills and developing our individuality .... may one day be applied, she said, to transform the "government of families, schools, and States." ... ""the liberating possibilities of the new moral treatments." The specifics of these methods don't matter. What is important is that after she had recovered from the Sam Ward-Anna Barker affair in 1840-41, during which, by some miracle, she evicted Timothy Fuller from her mental space - not entirely, as we shall see, but almost, she had in fact experienced emancipation and liberation - of the most visceral sort. At that point she no longer needed to devote so much energy to observing herself, explaining herself to herself, maintaining emotional boundaries and compartments that sequestered her depression until her next break, etc. Then, when she began her career in journalism - she could devote that energy to her social, economic, political criticism as she became progressively more progressive, as it were, writing to foster the emancipation, liberation, social/spiritual/intellectual development of others - and I mean all and sundry, everybody. (Think 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century.') Later in her life she became a convinced socialist and a strong advocate of violent democratic revolution (in Italy 1848-49) and so on. So this all makes perfect sense - free of depression - or living with manageable, normal depression - living her own life, from the inside out, writing from the inside out.
This is not to say that she was entirely free of certain pathological vulnerabilities. There was the infantile grandiosity to contend with from time to time - or perhaps it was just a bad habit. So for example, we read an excerpt from a letter to James Nathan dated 4 May 1844/5 (Capper is really lax in placing dates in his text): (p. 208) "There are ... in every age a few persons in whose lot the meaning of that age is concentrated. I feel that I am one of those persons in my age and sex. I feel chosen among women. I have deep mystic feelings in myself and intimations from elsewhere." At those time she seems to have considered herself a minor deity. OK. Well - there was a reason for that particular episode of regression.
She wrote that at a time when she had developed what must have been a very dysfunctional relationship with a very wealthy stockbroker, James Nathan, a cad, really, who was mildly abusive. A few quotes make this point. On p. 221 - Fuller: "I don't know that any words from your mouth gave me more pleasure, a strange kind of pleasure, that these, 'You must be a fool, little girl.' " Strange indeed. And there's more."My feeling with you was so delightful; it was a feeling of childhood." And one more (p. 238): " 'Why, why, must you leave me?' she wrote in one 'heart-sick' letter [to Nathan], lamenting her lost chances for 'so much natural joy and so many thoughts of childhood!' " I would very much like to know how often the words child, childhood, little girl, and their cognates appear in the record of that relationship that she left in letters and in her journal. In any case, she was still looking for Daddy, at least then, and so regression ensued - both the willingness to tolerate abuse and the revival of the coping mechanisms she had developed in childhood.
But she got beyond it all in fairly short order, I think - and took up her pen to advocate for every variety of the weak and disadvantaged, the down-trodden and the outcast. Emancipation, liberation, self-development in a free environment even if violent revolution were the means - just as she had experience in herself.
And then there's this very interesting fact that Fuller wrote into an article on current innovations in the treatment of the insane and in the reform of mental institutions. p. 265. "She even came out as a former mentally disturbed person herself, alluding to her collapse following her father's death by recalling how a certain person's 'intellectual race' had pushed her to a 'dangerous crisis' until she was saved by the prescriptions of 'thoughtless culture' of another reform psychiatrist, Amariah Bringham." And that's ALL. I realize that Capper had published volume 1 fifteen years before volume 2, and so couldn't insert this material where it rightly belonged. But who was Amariah Bringham? What treatments? How did all this happen? No clue.
So in any case, it all seems to be adding up - at least in my mind. But then again, I've not read the primary sources - nor will I.
At End.
After her involvement with James Nathan ended, Fuller seems to have recovered fully from pathological major depression. Capper covers many pages with the evidence. One example suffices. This from Emelyn Story, who knew her better and saw her more often than anyone else over Fuller's final years of life in Europe - in Rome, in particular. (p. 346) "I had learned to think of her as a person on intellectual stilts with a large share of arrogance & little sweetness of temper. How unlike to this was she now - so delicate, so simple, confiding & affectionate ... & what to me a still greater surprise, was possessed of [so] broad a charity that she could cover with its mantel the faults and defects of those about her." She came to desire nothing so much as a companionable husband and a child - which she acquired in due course.
Her ardent compassion for others became a firm commitment to "socialism," even if her specific notions regarding private property and the proper distribution of wealth and income seem rather vague in Capper's account. Perhaps she had none - apart from a desire for a fair share for all. Her compassion also became a fervent commitment to republican politics, the complete obliteration of any obstruction of any imaginable sort that inherited institutions and entrenched social groups might interpose to limit the opportunity of any individual to embark upon a life of heroic Goethe-ian self-discovery and self-realization. If violent revolution and the deaths of thousands were the price of liberty of that sort, then it would be cheap by half.
I can understand why a biographer might consider this transformation a discontinuity. Certainly the evidence suggests as much. But I sense continuity. As far as I can tell, Fuller remained the sort of person I designate an "intensity junkie." If the circumstances of her life weren't sufficiently stressful to keep adrenalin in her blood at sufficiently high concentrations, she found them - or created them.
If this addiction weren't already in her genetic material at the moment of conception, my sense is that it all began with that little girl - all of eight years old - forced to sit in her room until well past midnight waiting until her father found it convenient to call her into his study to hear her recitations. Can you imagine? Hour after hour after hour of anticipation - alone, after mother and siblings had gone to bed, in terror - knowing full well that whatever she might say would always fall short of the mark, and invite hypercritical shaming. Horrible anxiety - year after year after year. Life on the edge of a knife - it must change brain chemistry. And her life ended that way as well. Can you imagine finding yourself on the deck of a ship, grounded, in the midst of a hurricane, clinging to the remnants of a broken mast, while breakers tear the ship apart bit by bit, people jumping into the water to be carried off, until you are the very last person left, entirely alone - until that hulk finally breaks apart altogether, and the waves take you where they will. Hour - after hour - after hour. I see continuity in this.
I am very glad that I have made Margret Fuller's acquaintance, a person sui generis if there ever were one. She, along with Emerson, may very well have created the type, "public intellectual," a species now sadly extinct in the US, a multi-lingual, cosmopolitan polymath, ardent, fearless, relentless, unrelenting, unremitting in her expositions and criticisms that revealed the world of her time to itself.
And I am very grateful to Charles Capper for his decades of dedication to the person and memory of Margret Fuller. I can't imagine that one could ask more of any biographer.
I will also note that Capper's work confirms my sense that the biography of any literary figure can't possibly be captured in the pages of a single volume - even two or five. That biography is the product of a collaboration over decades, generations, expressed in volume after volume after volume.
In volume 2 of his biography Capper missed Fuller's third cycle of severe major depression, with psychotic features, that came upon that pitiable individual in 1840-1. This is not to say that he didn't insert related quotes and excerpts from Fuller's journal and letters as well as the observations of other persons, Emerson, most notably. He did, of course. Otherwise we would have no idea that it occurred.
He also missed the events in Fuller's inner life that led to the resolution of whatever conflicts had propelled these cycles/episodes in the first place. He notes the ending of this last cycle, and provides the relevant quotes of the "serenity" that Fuller experienced after a period of recovery - and for the remainder of her short life. But he doesn't explore this event of central importance in Fuller's biography. Not that she wouldn't have carried on even in the midst of continuing cycles of depression and recovery - she had in the past. But after 1840-41 she could proceed without interruption - and the torture of severe major depression.
I've witnessed recovery of this kind. So I know it can happen among particularly intelligent, introspective and self-honest persons, who decide that whatever plagues them is simply "not worth" the pain, and there is a sincere letting go of whatever it is (in a moment when life and death actually hangs in the balance), and the tortured self enters upon an inner life, much less vulnerable to depressive cycles than heretofore and to depression, when it occurs, much less severe and of much shorter duration, much more within the range of normal, than in earlier years.
Capper reports all of these events, but he doesn't organize this material into a narrative of its own and to integrate this narrative into a larger account of Fuller's life.
My reading, so far, is that Fuller had to stringently compartment her life in order to cope with depression. She seems to have established very strong boundaries among these compartments, of which, by my count, there were four: (1) her intellectual life - public and private, (2) her tormented, then not so tormented, emotional life, (3) her life as a member of a nuclear family, first her family of origin and then the family she established with a husband and child of he own, and (4) her social life that involved relationships with masses, literally hundreds, of friends and acquaintances.
So I hope to read a biography of Fuller - one day - that (1) takes Fuller's abuse in childbood and the resulting depression as a point of departure, (2) traces her development of a compartmented existence that sequestered her depression, as it were, and allowed her to develop her gifts in other domains of life, (3) delineates the interactions among these domains, (4) follows her development in each domain of her life (and their evolving interactions) so long as her depression led to disabling breaks, (5) describes how this coping mechanism and defense of self changed once the original reason for this particular organization of her life disappeared - or became much less powerful in her life - and (6) finally her development of a new organization of self and life after depression lost its power. On this last phase, I'm not so sure because I've only read through page 175 - with 375 pages yet to read.
I do admire Capper's work tremendously and sincerely. Without the product of his decades of labor, none of us would have the insights into Fuller that we now have, and she could not claim the indelible presence in our minds that she now possesses.
After p. 200.
It seems to me that a future biographer of Fuller could also detail the recovery process that followed her depressive breaks. Fuller's self was remarkably resourceful and tenacious in defending itself even while the compartments that she had established to sequester/segregate depression collapsed (temporarily) during a break. In those intervals - as Capper documents abundantly, Fuller's self escaped from a compartmented existence altogether into a mystical/transcendent realm. The evidence includes the numerous statements she recorded of her having "touched the secret of the universe" and thereby acquired "talismanic powers" and similar descriptions of her super-human powers, which revived in her from time to time. They did, as Capper describes, and their revival coincided with her periods of recovery from depressive states. Her episode of 1840-41 (following the Sam Ward kerfuffle) preceded months during which she claimed in her journal to possess special powers over other minds, whom she could manipulate/control at will. Some she could, Caroline Sturgis, for example - but only so long as Carolyn, an impulsive and extraordinarily wealthy woman, found it amusing to participate in Fuller's performance.
After p. 300
I really must put Margaret Fuller aside for a bit. After 900-1000 pages of the Divine Miss M. - I can't take it anymore, as in "Back off, Peggy, and lighten up!" - for a while. But before I forget, I want to make note of several very interesting statements of Fuller and Capper that allow us to form a tentative sense of the final segment of the trajectory of her inner life.
On p 208, Capper writes: "These new methods of emancipating our wills and developing our individuality .... may one day be applied, she said, to transform the "government of families, schools, and States." ... ""the liberating possibilities of the new moral treatments." The specifics of these methods don't matter. What is important is that after she had recovered from the Sam Ward-Anna Barker affair in 1840-41, during which, by some miracle, she evicted Timothy Fuller from her mental space - not entirely, as we shall see, but almost, she had in fact experienced emancipation and liberation - of the most visceral sort. At that point she no longer needed to devote so much energy to observing herself, explaining herself to herself, maintaining emotional boundaries and compartments that sequestered her depression until her next break, etc. Then, when she began her career in journalism - she could devote that energy to her social, economic, political criticism as she became progressively more progressive, as it were, writing to foster the emancipation, liberation, social/spiritual/intellectual development of others - and I mean all and sundry, everybody. (Think 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century.') Later in her life she became a convinced socialist and a strong advocate of violent democratic revolution (in Italy 1848-49) and so on. So this all makes perfect sense - free of depression - or living with manageable, normal depression - living her own life, from the inside out, writing from the inside out.
This is not to say that she was entirely free of certain pathological vulnerabilities. There was the infantile grandiosity to contend with from time to time - or perhaps it was just a bad habit. So for example, we read an excerpt from a letter to James Nathan dated 4 May 1844/5 (Capper is really lax in placing dates in his text): (p. 208) "There are ... in every age a few persons in whose lot the meaning of that age is concentrated. I feel that I am one of those persons in my age and sex. I feel chosen among women. I have deep mystic feelings in myself and intimations from elsewhere." At those time she seems to have considered herself a minor deity. OK. Well - there was a reason for that particular episode of regression.
She wrote that at a time when she had developed what must have been a very dysfunctional relationship with a very wealthy stockbroker, James Nathan, a cad, really, who was mildly abusive. A few quotes make this point. On p. 221 - Fuller: "I don't know that any words from your mouth gave me more pleasure, a strange kind of pleasure, that these, 'You must be a fool, little girl.' " Strange indeed. And there's more."My feeling with you was so delightful; it was a feeling of childhood." And one more (p. 238): " 'Why, why, must you leave me?' she wrote in one 'heart-sick' letter [to Nathan], lamenting her lost chances for 'so much natural joy and so many thoughts of childhood!' " I would very much like to know how often the words child, childhood, little girl, and their cognates appear in the record of that relationship that she left in letters and in her journal. In any case, she was still looking for Daddy, at least then, and so regression ensued - both the willingness to tolerate abuse and the revival of the coping mechanisms she had developed in childhood.
But she got beyond it all in fairly short order, I think - and took up her pen to advocate for every variety of the weak and disadvantaged, the down-trodden and the outcast. Emancipation, liberation, self-development in a free environment even if violent revolution were the means - just as she had experience in herself.
And then there's this very interesting fact that Fuller wrote into an article on current innovations in the treatment of the insane and in the reform of mental institutions. p. 265. "She even came out as a former mentally disturbed person herself, alluding to her collapse following her father's death by recalling how a certain person's 'intellectual race' had pushed her to a 'dangerous crisis' until she was saved by the prescriptions of 'thoughtless culture' of another reform psychiatrist, Amariah Bringham." And that's ALL. I realize that Capper had published volume 1 fifteen years before volume 2, and so couldn't insert this material where it rightly belonged. But who was Amariah Bringham? What treatments? How did all this happen? No clue.
So in any case, it all seems to be adding up - at least in my mind. But then again, I've not read the primary sources - nor will I.
At End.
After her involvement with James Nathan ended, Fuller seems to have recovered fully from pathological major depression. Capper covers many pages with the evidence. One example suffices. This from Emelyn Story, who knew her better and saw her more often than anyone else over Fuller's final years of life in Europe - in Rome, in particular. (p. 346) "I had learned to think of her as a person on intellectual stilts with a large share of arrogance & little sweetness of temper. How unlike to this was she now - so delicate, so simple, confiding & affectionate ... & what to me a still greater surprise, was possessed of [so] broad a charity that she could cover with its mantel the faults and defects of those about her." She came to desire nothing so much as a companionable husband and a child - which she acquired in due course.
Her ardent compassion for others became a firm commitment to "socialism," even if her specific notions regarding private property and the proper distribution of wealth and income seem rather vague in Capper's account. Perhaps she had none - apart from a desire for a fair share for all. Her compassion also became a fervent commitment to republican politics, the complete obliteration of any obstruction of any imaginable sort that inherited institutions and entrenched social groups might interpose to limit the opportunity of any individual to embark upon a life of heroic Goethe-ian self-discovery and self-realization. If violent revolution and the deaths of thousands were the price of liberty of that sort, then it would be cheap by half.
I can understand why a biographer might consider this transformation a discontinuity. Certainly the evidence suggests as much. But I sense continuity. As far as I can tell, Fuller remained the sort of person I designate an "intensity junkie." If the circumstances of her life weren't sufficiently stressful to keep adrenalin in her blood at sufficiently high concentrations, she found them - or created them.
If this addiction weren't already in her genetic material at the moment of conception, my sense is that it all began with that little girl - all of eight years old - forced to sit in her room until well past midnight waiting until her father found it convenient to call her into his study to hear her recitations. Can you imagine? Hour after hour after hour of anticipation - alone, after mother and siblings had gone to bed, in terror - knowing full well that whatever she might say would always fall short of the mark, and invite hypercritical shaming. Horrible anxiety - year after year after year. Life on the edge of a knife - it must change brain chemistry. And her life ended that way as well. Can you imagine finding yourself on the deck of a ship, grounded, in the midst of a hurricane, clinging to the remnants of a broken mast, while breakers tear the ship apart bit by bit, people jumping into the water to be carried off, until you are the very last person left, entirely alone - until that hulk finally breaks apart altogether, and the waves take you where they will. Hour - after hour - after hour. I see continuity in this.
I am very glad that I have made Margret Fuller's acquaintance, a person sui generis if there ever were one. She, along with Emerson, may very well have created the type, "public intellectual," a species now sadly extinct in the US, a multi-lingual, cosmopolitan polymath, ardent, fearless, relentless, unrelenting, unremitting in her expositions and criticisms that revealed the world of her time to itself.
And I am very grateful to Charles Capper for his decades of dedication to the person and memory of Margret Fuller. I can't imagine that one could ask more of any biographer.
I will also note that Capper's work confirms my sense that the biography of any literary figure can't possibly be captured in the pages of a single volume - even two or five. That biography is the product of a collaboration over decades, generations, expressed in volume after volume after volume.
Want to read
December 16, 2025818.3 Cap
July 15, 2012
This second volume of Charles Capper's acclaimed biography deals with the last ten years of his subject's life. From 1840 to 1850, Fuller established a series of firsts for women: editing a highbrow journal, authoring the first book-length discussion of the woman question, writing a travel and philosophical commentary on the new West, editing the literary pages of a New York newspaper, becoming an important foreign correspondent-and the only one to report firsthand (at considerable risk to herself) the revolution in Italy. Previous biographers, Capper suggests, have caricatured Fuller's accomplishments-even ridiculing her sexual liaison with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, captain in Rome's National Guard. She did not dabble in revolutionary politics, her biographer contends, but rather explored it as a means of becoming a more fulfilled American. Where others have seen a fitful record of accomplishment entailing the considerable opposition of her fellow Americans and ending in a tragic, even fated death by drowning, Capper (perhaps a little too protective and proud of his subject) sees a woman capable of great intellectual and emotional growth, a precursor of transatlantic Americans like Susan Sontag.
October 26, 2012
Although still a laborious read, I enjoyed this second volume considerable more than the first. This was probably owing to the more active nature of the Fuller's life, whereas the first volume is largely devoted to the development of her intellect. In this volume Fuller has come into her own as an active participant in the culturally rich world that she inhabited. Capper should be congratulated for the depth of his scholarship and his effort to help Fuller achieve the historical appreciation she deserves.
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