Margaret Fuller:
Introducing a Foremother

It's a difficult task to sum up the entirely unique life of a person whose significance far outstrips her renown and whose writing was prolific and dense. For this morning I've done my best to give the essential details of her life, and excerpts of her vocational and personal writing to give a sense of the person. In this way, I know you'll come away from this sermon at least with a strong sense of someone you may not have known much about before, an important UU in our history. And the excerpts and summaries of her thought will hopefully encourage you to seek out her writing in your local library and explore her more deeply yourselves.

Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, MA on May 23rd, 1810. Her father, Timothy, was domineering, opinionated, Unitarian, and holding office as one of Massachusetts' senators in Washington DC when she was born. Her mother, Margarett Crane Fuller was lovely, quiet, feminine, pious, patient with her husband, and sometimes independent-minded.

From first, Margaret was precocious. She had an unusual education in that it was on a par with that of most boys; like them she was reading Virgil in Latin by the time she was 6, and she went on from there to Plutarch beginning a lifetime love of ancient Roman authors and values. By the time she was eight she was also reading Shakespeare, Fielding, Moliere, and Cervantes. Most of her aesthetic experience was literary - she had few friends, no siblings near her age, and was only allowed to spend much time outdoors on weekend drives in the country with her parents. She was awkward with her peers, and shy, with a vocabulary from Plutarch and Shakespeare that didn't help her assimilate.

But over the years, as she matured, her social awkwardness mattered less as she began to develop a circle of friends with similar tastes and values and questions of life. She was fortunate to live in Cambridge which was already an intellectual center, and came into her own in her teens when she became part of a circle of friends including some eminent Unitarians like the young James Freeman Clarke. Together they read Lamb, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlisle. This romantic, spiritual poetry in turn inclined them to an interest in German literature, which was then deeply reflective of the romantic and spiritual trends in German philosophy. Where Unitarianism, then in its earliest form, still was imbued with the cold intellectualism of its puritan roots, the writings of Goethe and Schiller, which Margaret and her friends could read in German, offered warmth and a sense of spiritual discovery that was very compelling.

In 1781, in his work Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant had offered his idea that the mind is not a bland slate that passively accumulates sense impressions from the external world. Rather, Kant said, the mind is a free, actively creative force born into each human being, forming its own consciousness by selecting and arranging the sense impressions available to it. This cannot be explained by science or theology, it simply existed, like God. Kant called the mind's mysterious selective power of the mind 'transcendental' knowledge, because it transcends all rational attempts to analyze it.

This was the kernel of inspiration for the works of a new generation of German Romantic poets, including Schiller and Goethe. Goethe's poetry reflected a sense that nature and humanity were extensions of the divine; leaves, insects and people all had a unique nucleus of identity which he explored as a scientist and celebrated as an artist. He felt that all life was a continuously awe-inspiring gift, that no moment in a person1s life should be slurred over. The best lives were lived actively, and no experience, however painful or monotonous, was worthless.

Goethe and his fellows explored the sense that each individual was responsible for his own moral development, a joyful belief in the ultimate mysteriousness of an orderly universe, and a search, based on these beliefs, for new ways to explain God's relationship to creation. Their emotionally rich, spiritually-based writing had a deep effect on the young generation who would establish the forefront of 19th century American theology - the Unitarian transcendentalists, James Freeman Clarke, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller.

Margaret wrote in her journal in 1835:

"This is my ideal - the soul that, capable of the most delicate and strongest emotions, can yet look upon the world as it is with a free and eagle gaze, and, without any vain optimism or weak hope of a peculiar lot can...accept life. That is the true Stoicism - not to be insensible but superior to pain."

This was truly her philosophy and aspiration, and it was significant especially for her, because hers was an unusual life, with a good deal of pain and heartache that was tied to her own gifts and unconventionality. Most of her intellectual peers were men, indeed star students at Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School who could fulfill their ideas, philosophies and theologies by studying them, and then entering ministry and making such inquiry and life their vocation. Such paths were not yet available to women, even such gifted minds and souls as Margaret's. Her study was dedicated and informal. Devoted to Goethe she did some of the first translations of his work into English that were available in America. She began to write articles that were published in some of the early liberal journals, such as the Unitarian publication: Western Messenger.

Margaret's intellectual liaisons became lasting friendships with the leading religious liberals of her day, especially in 1836. That was when Margaret's long-standing desire to meet Ralph Waldo Emerson was finally fulfilled. He described his first sight of her: "She had a face and a frame that would indicate fullness and tenacity of life. She was rather under middle height; her complexion was fair with strong, fair hair. She was then, as always, becomingly dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness, - a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, - the nasal tone of her voice, - all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far."

Theirs became one of the most important and influential friendships of both her and his lives and work. Margaret broadened Emerson's mind and experience; he wrote of her: "You cannot predict her opinion. She sympathizes so fast with all forms of life, that she talks never narrowly or hostilely, nor betrays, like all the rest, under a thin garb of new words, the old droning cast-iron opinions or notions of many years' standing." And he deepened her mind and experience providing her with motivation and encouragement for her own work, as well as an extraordinary sparring partner for her growing theological and philosophical ideas.

Emerson in turn introduced Margaret to Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May Alcott, who was then running a highly progressive school called the Temple School. The Temple School had both boy and girl students, and was based on the liberal religious principle that all people had a spark of divinity in them. For this reason, Alcott believed it was important to allow children to express themselves freely; in contrast to other schools' recite-by-rote methods, Alcott's classes were conducted by a conversation method and no topic was banned. There Margaret taught Italian and German language and literature. Her work was hard but she believed in teaching and the values of the school and she stayed until the school was forced to close in 1837 when Alcott crossed the line by admitting a young female student who was half-black.

This was the beginning of a period of many years in Margaret's life when she earned a living by teaching at different schools, many girls' schools, and in her spare time translated Goethe and wrote articles and reviews on Unitarian theology, liberal education and women's rights, to satisfy her soul1s continuing hunger for spiritual and intellectual inquiry and communication.

Her employment was important to her, but her mental and soulful pursuits mattered most, and she derived intense enjoyment from an ever-growing circle of friends with whom she could pursue her interests. Her belief in change, and her rebellion against traditional societal parameters made her most comfortable among the Unitarian transcendentalists - indeed she was a participant in the Transcendentalists Club, one of its four women members.

"Margaret believed in a loving, anthropomorphic God, though she tended not to believe he intervened in individual lives. She believed in heaven and believed most souls were headed there. She believed in the improvement of society based on the spiritual renewal of the individual, but she did not thing society was perfectible. She believed that her own country, because of its vitality and idealism and youth and formlessness held the best promise for such improvement. She admired Emerson's mysticism, but ultimately found his conception of god too cold and his idea of immortality too vague. She loved nature, but was also alienated from it because she was at her best among people." -- Margaret Fuller, by Paula Blanchard

Unlike Emerson, whose inspiration was nature, Margaret got her inspiration from words and people. Both her arrogance and her dependence are evident in part of a letter she wrote once to Emerson:

"I have shut the door for a few days, and tried to do something; you have really been doing something. And that is why I write. I want to see you, and still more to hear you. I must kindle my torch again. why have I not heard you this winter? I feel very humble just now, yet I have to say that being lives not who would have received from your lectures as much as I should. There are noble books, but one want s the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see. I think that is enough to say about them."

Perhaps her best known contribution to American philosophy and theology was her editorship of the then-renowned and cutting edge Unitarian transcendentalist journal: "The Dial." She agreed to become its editor, and then became its backbone and heart as well. She enlisted and refined some of the most significant thought of that century in America, including that of Emerson, Alcott, Clarke, Channing and Parker, and was herself a primary contributor as well. Some other women intellectuals contributed poetry, but almost always under conditions of strict anonymity.

It was during this time that she became friends with Henry David Thoreau, Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Any thought or faith not present in The Dial was represented at the ongoing meetings of the Transcendental Club. Her penetrating mind was matched by this time, by a tremendous conversational aptitude which made her one of the club's most inspiring and interesting contributors. Emerson said her conversation was the most entertaining in America. And W.H. Channing expressed his own sense that she was a genius, with a rare combination of opposite qualities in the vernacular of their era: she was like a woman with a tremendous brain or a man of tremendous heart and courage.

About this time, she needed to supplement her income, which was not much from The Dial, and began to offer a course of conversations on liberalism, women's rights and theology, available to women. The specific topics were broad: Education, Culture, Ignorance, Vanity, Prudence, Patience, Health, Greek Mythology, and more. The conversations were held on Saturday mornings, and were perhaps a close as a woman of Margaret's talents could yet approach to what would now have been her obvious path: the pulpit and Sunday mornings.

And it was her feminism that was her greatest contribution to The Dial and to liberal religious thought generally during this time in America. Her best known article appeared in the July 1843 issue, and it was based on her own poignant and bitter sense of the difference between the freedom enjoyed by the women who participated in her weekly conversation series for two hours every Saturday, and the tightly limited reality of the rest of most of their weekly lives. She pointed out the obvious lack of concern for women among the other liberal causes of the day: abolitionism, educational reform, improvement of conditions for the poor, the mentally ill, the imprisoned.

Hers was a radical call, and a challenge, which liberalism shrank from because to address the issue would require such drastic change in the lives, households and understandings of everyone who would concern themselves with any real sense of responsibility. She wrote that if we accept the premise that all souls are equal before God, and if we are concerned for the application of this to the lives of African Americans and Native Americans, then we must apply the same equality to women. "We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to women as freely as to man." More, she went on to recognize the androgynous capacity of the individual mind: "There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman...Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo, woman of the masculine as Minerva." Above all, she contended that women should not be defined by their relationships to men. Though gentle in tone, her article was beyond the most liberal assumptions of the day. It was courageous, it brought Margaret very wide public attention far beyond her own circle, and it confronted her own Transcendentalist friends with an issue within their own ideals.

Margaret continued to lead an unusual life. Disappointed in love, she continued to struggle between her own longing for romantic involvement, and her commitment to her independence and self-cultivation. Continuing to write and edit the Dial, and relying on her many friends for caring and connection did not dispel her loneliness, or even sustain her self-esteem. In her journal she wrote:

"I have no home on earth, and I can think of one that would have a degree of beautiful harmony with my inward life. But, driven from home to home as a renouncer I get the picture and poetry of each. Keys of gold, silver, iron and lead are in my casket. No one loves me. But I love many a good deal, and see some way into their eventual beauty. I am myself growing better, and shall by and by be a worthy object of love, one that will not anywhere disappoint or need forbearance. Meanwhile I have no fetter on me, no engagement, and as I look on others...can I fail to feel this a great privilege?...And yet the varied calls on my sympathy have been such that I hope not to be made partial, cold or ignorant by this isolation. I have no child, and the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyze me. But now as I look on these lovely children of a human birth what slow and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother. The children of the muse come quicker...rest more lightly on the bosom..."

Her life was to remain different for some time. When funding for The Dial eventually failed, she took a trip to the West with friends in a covered wagon and began to write increasingly about importance and possibilities of self-reliance for women and for the human soul, a theme shared by Emerson. Her thoughts from this period were summed up in the well-received work: Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

When she returned from her travels in the West, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune hired her as a reviewer and correspondent, and even gave her a place to stay in New York. She was one of the first to introduce Americans to the work of George Sand, Honore de Balzac, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and shared her status as a reviewer of significant status only with Edgar Allen Poe who was also living in NYC at the time and working as a reviewer.

Eventually the opportunity arose for her to travel with friends in Europe, especially in Italy, and to work as a correspondent for the Tribune. Able thus to finance her travels, if she lived frugally, she went, and it was here, in 1847, that her life took yet another startling turn. Separated from friends at St. Peter's in Rome, she met an Italian named Giovanni Angelo Ossoli from an old family of modest fortune with longstanding ties to the Vatican. Ossoli and she fell in love, and eventually were married in Italy. On September 5th, 1848, Margaret gave birth to a son whom she and Giovanni named Angelo and it was perhaps before, perhaps after this that they were married - records continue to be unclear on this point. Margaret stayed in Rome in 1849 during Italy's failed struggle to become a free republic, and was close with many of the republican agitators, and witnessed the devastation of the city with anguish. Her son was kept outside Rome in nearby Rieti, but the people caring for him turned out to be unreliable and she left to nurse him back to health. During this time, Margaret's only professional writing was for the Tribune, and clearly the rest of her energy was going to Giovanni, Angelo and their life in Italy. Her letters to friends, even mainstays like Emerson, declined and eventually stopped, and even the few friends she did stay in touch with were not privy to much of her thoughts and feelings about her life or her future at this time. After some limited and oblique communication to her old friends in America, she and Giovanni finally decided to travel to the States with their son in 1850.

They sailed from Italy for New York in May of 1850. On July 19, hours from New York harbor, their ship, the Elizabeth, floundered in a heavy storm and struck a sand bar off Fire Island beach at around 3:30 am. The ship was stuck aground. Some passengers jumped off the ship in attempt to reach the shore, only a couple of hundred yards away and a couple made it. The rest, including Margaret, Giovanni and Angelo, were drowned when the sea finally pounded the ship apart at about 3 in the afternoon, July 19th. Margaret Fuller was 40 years old.

She was not free to preach from a pulpit, like her friends Emerson, Parker and Channing. She was not free to live alone in a hut in a pond, scribble her reflections and still move in American intellectual circles like Thoreau. Margaret was not free to go to college and be degreed and engage professionally in a life of scholarship and lecture. She was able to be published only when translating or reviewing men's writing and thought, or to include her own theology and philosophy when editing that of others, mostly men. And yet she had little anger or bitterness about the limitations of her life's possibilities, and indeed she saw more adventure, and associated with more people of achievement and brilliance, than many of us, male or female, today. She epitomized some of what is best in feminism in holding all people, men and women, to high standards of fairness and aspiration, without recrimination or favoritism. She contributed to some of our country1s most significant legacy of thought and spirituality, both in her own recorded musings, and in her capacity to feed and refine the energy and insight of those around her who shared similar goals and dreams. She was one of our country's leading thinkers. She was one of our denomination's leading theologians. And she was a muse - her achievement is not only apparent in her articles, essays, reviews, journals entries and letters it is also available in the writings of many others we admire from the history of our nation and our denomination. She is another link in the heritage of human aspiration and achievement, one who knew more than she was known, one whom we may now know and honor for all that made her special, and all that made her one of us.

Amen