An+Introduction+to+Margaret+Fuller


 * Margaret Fuller **

Original Author: Takea Burrage, ENG206 SP10

Revision Author: Aimee Tacey, ENG206 SP11

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born May 23, 1810, at 71 Cherry Street Cambridgeport, Massachusetts to Margarett Crane and Timothy Fuller, Jr (margaretfuller.org). Fuller received an intense education from her father, allowing her to learn latin and greek at an early age. She also learned German and Italian in later years. She attended Miss Prescott's Young Ladies Seminary at Groton, Massachusetts during the years 1824-25 (Fuller, Woman 161). After her father's death she was responsible for making sure her younger siblings received the same education (American). She “tutors [her] siblings almost full time, which she finds “a serious and fatiguing charge”” (margaretfuller.org). She taught others at both Bronson Alcott's Temple School and the Green Street School in Providence, Rhode Island (ATW). As Fuller grew into a woman she had made many names for herself, a transcendentalist, literary critic, editor, teacher, journalist, and even political activist. She was the “first American to write a book about equality for women”, the “first editor of //The Dial, // foremost Transcendentalist journal, appointed by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, the “first woman to enter Harvard Library to pursue research”, the “first woman journalist on Horace Greeley’s //New York // //Daily // //Tribune” ////, the “first woman literary critic who also set literary standards”, and the “first woman foreign correspondent and war correspondent to serve under combat conditions” ( // [|margaretfuller.org] //). Fuller was a trail-blazer. And she blazed her trail close to the Quad Cities area. //

In 1843 she took a four month long trip to the west. She traveled with “Sarah and James Freeman Clarke, and their mother, Rebecca to Illinois and Wisconsin to experience the American wilderness and witness the consequences of Native American displacement; she [was] transported by the natural beauty of the West, but profoundly troubled by the “plight of the Indian”” (margaretfuller.org). Fuller's trip west helped her to write a book about her experiences during the trip and also what she witnessed of the harsh treatment that the Native Americans endured. Her book was titled //Summer on the Lakes //. The area that Fuller would be studying was said to be the “virgin but rapidly settling upper Mississippi valley” (virgin lands). Fuller had been told by friends that the west was the only way into America. It was //Summer on the Lakes //// that “charmed...Horace Greeley [into] ask[ing] her to join his newspaper, the New York ////Tribune ////<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> as book review editor” (ATW). //

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">In her trip Fuller was searching for the folk culture that was celebrated by European Romanticism (virgin lands). She traveled across the Great Lakes by train, steamboat, carriage and foot (Summer). “A distinctive and often humorous record, the volume captures the spirit of people and places, the habits and relationships unique to the developing frontier. Fuller gets directly to the essential spirit of the new land,” writes Babette Inglehart of Chicago State University.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The areas Fuller traveled through did fulfill all her fantasies of their beauty. Though because Fuller took her trip during a time when their was a large economic crisis going on, many questioned the progress that was said to be being made in nature (Romanticism). Fuller's trip was no coincidence when it came to the timing. She set out to show that the west still was a place of beauty and wildlife. “Fuller reported that women were confined to an exclusively domestic role even on the frontier, and that their new home constituted not any flowering garden but only a rude cabin, sometimes without even windows from which to gaze out on the surrounding beauty” (Romanticism). As she went through she also came across the Rock River and described that to be something of a utopia and considered it to be promising land.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Fuller crossed the Rock River at Dixon's Ferry, not so far from the Quad Cities, which is now known as Dixon, Illinois. She did find it to be a thing of beauty. Her words of description: “this beautiful stream flows full and wide over a bed of rocks” (Fuller, Summer 43). She was so impressed, in fact, that she declared the “great part of country along it's banks [as] the finest region in Illinois” (Fuller, Summer 43). Fuller muses about Chief Black Hawk and his reasoning for returning to the area, “no wonder he could not resist the longing...to return to in summer to this home of beauty” (Fuller, Summer 43). Fuller was also awed by the wildlife along the river, “along the face of...crumbling rocks, swallows' nests are clustered, thick as cities, and eagles and deer do not disdain their summits” (Fuller, Summer 44). Fuller and her party spent three days in the Dixon area, “days of unalloyed, spotless happiness” (Fuller, Summer 46). They stayed at a cabin, “on the bend of the river” (Fuller, Summer 44). Fuller enjoyed her stay immensely. She loved the “very rich and commanding view” (Fuller, Summer 45). She even had the privilege of experiencing “one grand thunderstorm, which added new glory to the scene” (Fuller, Summer 47).

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Tragically, Fuller was killed in a shipwreck, cause by storm, at age 40. She watched her significant other, the Marquess Giovanni Angelo Ossoli and their child, Angelo Eugene Phillip Ossoli drown. Before the waves took her, she was heard mournfully murmuring of the death that surrounded her. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">(Sarah) Margaret Fuller (Ossoli), 1810–1850: []


 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Works Cited **

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">American Transcendentalism Web. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">[|http://www.vcu.edu]

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Margaret Fuller: Virgin Lands. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">[|http://blog.oup.com] <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> Copyright Oxford University Press, Inc. 2006

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Newman, Lance. Romanticism on the Net. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">[|http://www.erudit.org]

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Photograph of Engraving of Margret Fuller. Second Edition 1896.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">[|http://books.google.com]

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Fuller, Margaret. //Summer on the lakes, in 1843.// C.C. Little and James Brown, 1844. http://books.google.com/books?id=EpJLAAAAMAAJ&dq=margaret+fuller+summer+on+the+lakes&source=gbs_navlinks_s

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Fuller, Margaret, and Larry J. Reynolds. //Woman in the nineteenth century: an authoritative text, backgrounds, criticism//. New York [etc.: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. 168-172. Print.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">[]

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">American Transcendentalism Web. []

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