Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller

Sarah Margaret Fuller (born May 23, 1810 in Cambridge , Massachusetts , † July 19, 1850 in front of Fire Island , New York ) was an American writer and journalist from the inner circle of transcendentalists and one of the leading intellectuals in New England . With her main work Women in the 19th Century , she established her reputation as an early feminist .

youth

Margaret Fuller was the eldest daughter of lawyer and politician Timothy Fuller , who served in the US Congress from 1817 to 1825. Early on, she showed an extraordinary talent, which her father encouraged. He began his reading and writing lessons before she was four years old. Latin soon followed. Their first regular school from 1819 was the Port School in Cambridge. Then she attended various girls' schools in Boston and Groton (Massachusetts) until 1826 . Afterwards, Fuller familiarized herself with world literature and the German classics and began to learn German with James Freeman Clarke , which in later years enabled her to translate Goethe's Torquato Tasso and Eckermann's conversations with Goethe . She also translated the correspondence between Bettina von Arnim and Karoline von Günderrode .

In preparation for her career as a journalist and translator, she planned a trip to Europe. However, she had to give up this plan when her father died in 1835. Margaret Fuller took responsibility for the younger siblings. She prepared 13-year-old brother Arthur Buckminster Fuller for college attendance and theology studies. He was later the editor of his sister's posthumous writings.

job and career

Fuller was a teacher at the Temple School of Amos Bronson Alcott also attended by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody taught. Through both of them she came into contact with the new movement of transcendentalism . In 1837 she went to Providence , Rhode Island, to Greene Street School for a year . Upon her return, she began her discussion groups for young women at the Peabody home. Her extensive education made a wide range of topics possible: Greek mythology, history, literature and visual arts. With these courses she countered the disadvantage of women in school and university. Her experiences were reflected in numerous articles that made her widely known as an advocate of women's rights.

After Margaret Fuller had met Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1835, she accepted his invitation in 1840 to publish the transcendentalist magazine The Dial (Magazine for Literature, Philosophy and Religion), which she did until 1842. On the subsequent several month trip to the Great Lakes together with James Freeman Clarke , she also gained impressions of the unsolved problem of the disadvantaged indigenous people. The result of the trip was her report Summer on the Lakes .

Her successor at The Dial was George Ripley , the founder of the socially utopian Brook Farm settlement . Fuller did not join the commune, but sympathized with it and visited it often. Her friends had built her own cottage there. In 1845 she went to New York, where she worked for the New York Tribune , which Horace Greely had founded a few years earlier. She sent the newspaper to Europe in 1846 as a foreign correspondent. She covered the literary scene and interviewed prominent writers, including George Sand and Thomas Carlyle .

In Europe

Inscription of the memorial stone for Margaret Fuller

In Europe she got caught up in the pre-revolutionary unrest of the time. Already in England she met the freedom fighter Giuseppe Mazzini , who lived there in exile. He was one of the spiritual leaders of the Risorgimento (Restoration, Resurrection). The aim was to overcome the foreign rule of both the Habsburgs and the Bourbons and the unification of Italy. Through him she later met the Polish revolutionary Adam Mickiewicz and Mazzini's follower, Giovanni Angelo Marchese d'Ossoli (* 1821), whom she also married. Their son was born in September 1848. The proclamation of the Roman Republic in February 1849 led to the military intervention of France, which, after a five-month siege of Rome, overturned the republic and restored papal rule. During the fighting, Fuller supported the Republic cause through her work at the Fate bene Fratelli hospital . After the defeat, Margaret Fuller left Italy with her husband and son. The ship that was supposed to bring the three of them to America in 1850 sank off Fire Island , killing the family with it. A memorial stone stands in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge .

Redefinition of the image of women

The demand made by the transcendentalists for self-determination, personal responsibility and self-perfection of the human being in the detachment from internal and external dependencies was also a major concern for Margaret Fuller. As one of the first more prominent writers in America, she consistently applied these principles to the situation of women, whose role in her day was still largely limited to the domestic sphere, and created a new model for women that must have been provocative to many of her contemporaries.

She not only turned against the prevailing stereotype of women as a primarily emotionally determined being and insisted on intellectual education equally for women, but also demanded that women step out of the private sphere that was shaped by their role as mother and wife, into the public sphere of work and society. Based on the intellectual equality of women, she worked incessantly for an equal relationship between the sexes; The personal dependency of women in their relationship with men, similar to slavery, should instead become a mutual respectful relationship.

In her demands, Margaret Fuller went far beyond the androcentrism of traditional thinking and postulated the transcendentalist principle of self-reliance without reservation for women in a reversal of the male pattern of thought and relationship. With her major work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844), which emerged from the essay The Great Lawsuit and was inspired by the Boston panel discussions, she wrote the manifesto of a feminist transcendentalism that was not only quite effective in her time, but also one of her secured an undisputed place in American literary history.

The core thesis of her work, which from today's perspective is considered the most important American treatise on the situation of women before Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics (1898), is that man and woman are the two halves of a great 'dualism'. If both could develop unhindered, the result would not be discord, but an 'enchanting' harmony that would help women, but not least also men, to achieve full self-realization. Fuller does not understand the existing polarity of the sexes as an essentialist definition, but as a cultural product that - insofar as there may be essential differences - does not represent an exclusivity, but rather the poles of a continuum. In the spirit of modern feminism, there is neither an exclusively male man nor an exclusively female woman; both go over with each other up to the possibility of exchanging roles. According to Fuller, the current definition of gender-typical properties, roles or "spheres" is in contradiction to the infinity of the human soul assumed by it and therefore needs to be abolished in the interests of both sexes.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a hard-to-read book, not only because of the complexity of the argumentation, but also because of the unusual combination of expository and poetic representation strategies. In its basic structure, the work ties in with the classic sermon or speech form, the inner coherence of which, however, is interrupted by inserted dramatizations, aphoristic sentences and a dialogical conversational tone and also supplemented by multilayered references to literature, mythology and history. In extremely graphic and metaphor-rich language, Fuller critically questions the traditional prejudices and self-evidentities of the contemporary male-dominated worldview with numerous surprising ideas and phrases. She quotes from the preamble of the Declaration of Independence the inalienable basic right "All men are born free and equal" listed there and states that this very basic right is withheld from women. The traditional Orpheus myth is reversed by her from the point of view of Eurydice , whose development towards creative independence will ultimately also contribute to a higher development of the man. In her argument she repeatedly refers to the diverse creative actions of women in historical and social practice, for example in the history of the French Revolution or the fight against slavery.

Margaret Fuller wanted more than just external changes; Above all, it was about an inner change that should enable women to develop their practical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual abilities in a way in which the gender-specific does not disappear, but merges into a general human emancipation perspective. She thus approaches a more androgynous view of man: In her view, the difference between the sexes is effective in each individual in different ways, which makes cooperation, but not confrontation, of the externally opposing poles indispensable.

With her own personality and work, Margaret Fuller embodied the courage to break traditional role constraints, but also showed the difficulties and resistances that were associated with it.

Her own childhood socialization took place in a completely atypical form, contrary to all usual expectation patterns: Her father raised her like a boy and tried with hard drill to shape her into an intellectual child prodigy who could quote Virgil or Ovid at the age of six , but little contact with others Had children and drew his picture of reality less from his own experience than from books or second hand.

In her 1852 memoir , Margaret Fuller lamented this classicistic narrowness and the top-heavy nature of her rationalistic upbringing. The one-sided expression of the intellect already in early childhood led not only to an alienation from unmediated experiences of reality, but also from one's own emotions, which were manifested in overstrain symptoms such as nightmares or chronic headaches.

Fuller drowned off the American coast with her husband and son in 1850 on their return from Italy. The manuscript of her last work on the history of the revolutions in Rome was lost.

Despite various recent biographical studies and an excellent edition of her correspondence, the dimensions and scope of her thought and work have remained rather vague in many details to this day. Fuller's particular strength lay in creative dialogue with an extraordinary gift for conversation; Her mentor Ralph Emerson noted in his diary after her death that he had lost his audience with her. When Henry Jamens coined the term "Margaret-ghost" at the turn of the century, he was referring to the insight that Fuller, as "one of the greatest intellectual capacities in the USA", was unfortunately a kind of shadow, not least because of her preferred medium of conversation stayed.

Trivia

• Her birthplace is now the lively Margaret Fuller neighborhood house, which is used for education and the promotion of social skills.
• The architect and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) is her great-nephew, as is the journalist and writer John Phillips Marquand (1893-1960), who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for his novel The Blessed Mister Apley .
• Margaret Fuller is considered a role model for Zenobia , a main character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852).

Works (selection)

• Summer on the Lakes , 1843
• Literature and Art , New York 1852 ( digitized version )
• Woman in the Nineteenth Century , London 1855 ( digitized version ); later edition New York 1869 ( digitized version , e-text )
• Memoirs , Boston 1857 (digital copies: part 1 , part 2 ; e-texts: part 1 , part 2 )
• At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe , 1856, edited by her brother Arthur Buckminster Fuller, later Editions: Boston 1874 ( partially digitized ); New York 1869 ( digitized , e-text )
• Art, Literature, and the Drama , New York 1869 ( digitized version ), contains Papers on Literature and Art and Fuller's translation of Goethe's Torquato Tasso
• Life Without and Life Within. Or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems , 1858, edited by her brother Arthur Buckminster Fuller, later Edition: New York 1869 ( digitized version )

literature

• Mason Wade: Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius , New York, NY: Viking Press, 1940
• AW Brown: Margaret Fuller , New York 1964
• Russell E. Durning: Margaret Fuller, Citizen of the World. An intermediary between European and American Literatures . (= Yearbook for American Studies ; Supplement 26). Winter, Heidelberg 1969
• BG Chevigny: The Woman and the Myth. Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings , New York 1976
• Abby Slater: In Search of Margaret Fuller. A Biography , New York 1978
• Paula Blanchard: Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution , Reading, Massachusetts 1987
• Madeleine B. Stern: The life of Margaret Fuller , New York [u. a.]: Greenwood Pr., 1991, ISBN 0-313-27526-2
• Donna Dickenson: Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman's Life , New York 1993
• Joan von Mehren: Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller , Amherst, Massachusetts 1994 ISBN 0-87023-941-4
• Dieter Schulz: American transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1997, ISBN 3-534-09407-7
• Fritz Fleischmann (Ed.): Margaret Fuller's Cultural Critique. Her Age and Legacy , Lang, New York et al. 2000, ISBN 0-8204-3952-5 (volume of articles)
• Christel-Maria Maas: Margaret Fuller's transnational project. Self-education, feminine culture and American national literature based on the German model , Universitätsverlag Göttingen, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-938616-38-5 (plus Göttingen, Univ., Revised dissertation, 2004), full text as PDF
• Meg McGavran Murray: Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim. University of Georgia Press, Athens (Georgia) and London 2012, 1st edition 2008, ISBN 978-0-8203-2894-2
• Victor Grossman : Rebel Girls: Portraits of 34 American Women. Papyrossa, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-894-38501-9 , pp. 30-39
• John Matteson: The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography. WW Norton & Company , New York et al. a. 2013, ISBN 978-0-393-34359-5
• Stefanie Rechtsteiner: The concept of Continued Growth in the life and work of Margaret Füller. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2013, ISBN 978-3-631-63884-2

Individual evidence

1. ^ Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, Leipzig and Vienna 1894, Vol. 6, p. 993
2. ↑ Christoph König (Ed.), With the assistance of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 1: A-G. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , p. 539.
3. ↑ Cf. Hubert Zapf : Margaret Fuller: Feministische Transzendentalistin . In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 105-107, here especially pp. 106f.
4. ↑ Cf. Dieter Schulz: Fuller, Margaret. In: Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors . Metzler, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 , p. 262 f.
5. ↑ Cf. Dieter Schulz: Fuller, Margaret. In: Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors . Metzler, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 , p. 262 f.
6. ↑ Cf. Hubert Zapf : Margaret Fuller: Feministische Transzendentalistin . In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 105-107, here especially pp. 106f. See also in detail Christel-Maria Maas: Margaret Fuller's transnational project. Self-education, feminine culture and American national literature based on the German model , Universitätsverlag Göttingen, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-938616-38-5 (also Göttingen, Univ., Revised Diss., 2004), pp. 143–155, full text as PDF
7. ↑ Cf. Hubert Zapf : Margaret Fuller: Feministische Transzendentalistin . In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 105-107, here especially p. 107.
8. ↑ Cf. Hubert Zapf : Margaret Fuller: Feministische Transzendentalistin . In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 105-107, here especially pp. 105f.
9. ↑ Cf. Dieter Schulz: Fuller, Margaret. In: Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors . Metzler, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 , p. 264.

Web links

Commons : Margaret Fuller  - Album with Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Margaret Fuller in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography, literature & sources for Margaret Fuller on fembio.org of the Institute for Women's Biography Research