An Extraordinary Generous Seeking: Celebrating the Life of Margaret Fuller
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- Created on Sunday, 23 May 2010 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
{player 2010-05-23-9am-sermon.mp3}
In Rome today, on a speck of an island in the Tiber River,
Italians will pause to celebrate an American they see as a heroine.
In 1849, Margaret Fuller ran a hospital on that island
They will stand in the room where she cared for wounded soldiers and perhaps reach out to touch the cannonball that is still there.
When the French attacked
All the foreigners in Rome fled the city
But not Margaret.
She stayed, she worked, she cared and for that,
Italians will remember her today at the Hospital Fratebenefratelli.
(My brother Tom who lives in Rome with his family will be there as well).
* * *
Here in America, Unitarian Universalists across the country are celebrating today,
Lifting up the life of this woman who was unknown to many of us till just recently.
If you’ve never heard of her, you’re not alone.
Raised as a Unitarian, Fuller was not a churchgoer as an adult
She found religion in her own heart and in nature, and
When she came to Concord on numerous visits, she moved quickly to the center
of the Transcendentalist circle here,
These women and men whose spiritual and intellectual energy was lighting up the New England sky like fireworks
She went on to become editor of the first avant-garde journal in America, The Dial.
She created the “Conversation” series for women in Boston, a female intellectual institution on par with the more famous, mostly male, Transcendental Club
First woman to be hired as a literary critic by a major American newspaper.
First foreign correspondent for that paper.
Her book Woman in the 19th Century was a best seller in 1845, groundbreaking, an early feminist work that Elizabeth Cady Stanton later claimed had laid the philosophical foundation for the women’s rights movement.
I think you know that I believe Margaret Fuller was a woman of intellect and courage,
What Maya Angelou would call a great soul
AND
I am not here to idealize Margaret Fuller.
She was as human as any one of us.
She faced obstacles and had struggles.
She could get angry, knew depression and sometimes the edge of despair.
She had a sharp edged wit, a gift for friendship
And plenty of self-doubt
On the one hand, vulnerability, on the other hand, intense ambition
She could annoy people and they in turn disappointed her.
To me, this humanity makes her more compelling not less.
I am not here to idealize her.
I believe there is something in her story that will feed us.
Who knows where we are on our journeys as we come here today?
Maybe some of us have come here feeling weary
We have come feeling lonely, like we’ve lost direction,
We’re looking for contact with something beyond ourselves, something that matters
We have come seeking, searching.
We have come looking for that little bit of strength, strength we need for the living of these days.
There is bread here for those of us who are hungry.
There is courage here for those of us who are faltering.
There is a story here for us. Listen.
* * * *
The sea was calm. The woman stood at the rail of the ship, watching the Cambridge of her childhood fade from sight. She was thirty six years old, with light brown hair that looked almost blond and eyes that would look right into your’s. Europe at last. How many years had she been waiting for just this day.
Part of her wondered if it was too late.
After all, she was a woman already fully formed, not a woman in the making.
She’d been slated to go to Europe ten years ago but then her father had died.
She had to take charge, make money, look after younger brothers and sisters.
Was it too late?
Still, to stand on that ground at last.
She’d grown up on stories of Roman heroes. Men of action and daring.
To walk in the places where they had strutted and spoken, the ancient stones of the Appian Way, the Forum.
That classical education her father had given her, the ideals of the Roman Republic—courage,, austerity, will—they had been the ideals of her childhood, and
They had become a kind of “rule for living” in these last difficult years.
It felt like all her life she had been getting ready for Europe. She remembered learning Latin at six. Walking to school when she was 11, that long walk from home in Cambridgeport, across the Charles River and on to Mount Vernon Street, practicing practicing French and Italian vocabulary as she went.
As a young adult,
No college class had asked it of her
(no college took women in those days)
But she got up at 5, stayed up till 11, reading, learning.
She’d made herself into America’s authority on Europe, translating Goethe, commenting on Coleridge, de Stael and Wordsworth.
At last she was on her way. Italy. Goethe had once called it “the land where the lemon trees bloom.”
Margaret Fuller turned her face to the sea.
Boston faded from her sight.
She felt the wind, and she began to dream.
* * * *
By the time Fuller sailed to Europe in August of 1846, her name was known around the world.
But fifteen years before, things had looked very different. She’d been a twenty-something, as bright as could be, a rising star, a meteor really, her mind flashing across the sky.
She had a precision to her thinking, a rigor, but she could also be creative. She wrote poems and stories, knew the power of metaphor and myth.
She was a rising star but there was no place for a star such as she. No place for a woman with a “mind on fire” to borrow Robert Richardson’s phrase.
She inhaled books as voraciously as her peer,
Unitarian minister Theodore Parker—also born in 1810—
But unlike Parker, Fuller could not go to Harvard.
She could not become a minister, lawyer, professor.
She had been born at a time in history when revolutions had changed the face of the world-- the American Revolution, the French Revolution
Yes, human beings had certain inalienable rights and much was changed
But women and slaves were still left on the margins
In 1830, there were two million slaves in America;
women could not own property, they could not vote.
They stood before the law not as their own person, but only through the personhood of their husband.
As a 22 year old, Margaret watched her friends, the men becoming Unitarian ministers, the women getting married. She couldn’t do one and she didn’t want to do the other.
She knew she had a vocation in the world, a calling, as a thinker, writer, speaker, leader. But the world of her day did not let her make it real. Perhaps you understand how terribly it can hurt a soul to be thwarted in this way. To be told there is no place for you here, no path, no way.
She was frustrated, restless. One summer she fell into a deep depression.
“Very early on,” she had said, “I knew the only object in life was to grow.”
So now she did the only thing she knew how to do. She put her head down, she worked hard, she kept on growing.
When the world said that rigorous education was unsuitable for a woman,
That it would ruin her health,
That it would make her unmarriageable,
That it was only for men
Margaret Fuller turned her back on the world and kept on learning.
* * *
When her father died in 1835, life as she knew it was over. The comfortable life of an adored oldest child growing up in Cambridge.
She was a young woman who needed to re-invent herself.
Concord was not a bad place to start.
She came here first in July of 1836, 26 years old, with her life in some kind of chaos. That summer she stayed with the Emersons and met Bronson Alcott who offered her a job at his school in Boston. She taught there that winter, and then in Providence, and then the Conversations, editing the Dial, publishing articles and then a book.
Margaret was on her way.
“This is partly the story,” claims historian Christine Stansell, “about the good things that can happen when a person leaves Boston.”
Well, I was born in Boston and you know I don’t agree that Fuller needed to leave New England in order to fully bloom. But leave it she did. The Concord chapter of her life, as essential as it was for this woman on the move, was over.
She had asked those two important questions: “What were we born to do? How are we going to do it?”
Now Fuller answered those questions for herself, as she moved outward on a trajectory of growth: Boston, London, Paris, Rome.
Her mind sharpening, her soul expanding, her vocation deepening.
She was becoming, at last, her own self.
* * * *
The young woman stood on the balcony of the villa and looked out over Rome. Early morning and the old stones of the city glowed in the sun.
It had been a long and terrible night. She had heard the cannon pound and roar, watched fire streak across the sky. She knew that hundreds must have died.
She felt like she would be torn in two with worry. She could picture her husband,
half way across the city on the walls of the Vatican fighting with Garibaldi.
She could picture her baby:
Little Nino whom she had left in a hill town to keep him safe.
She closed her eyes for a moment, letting herself drift back to a place that could quiet and calm her soul.
In her mind’s eye, she could see again the river and meadows of Concord,
the Emersons’ big white house where she’d spent so many nights,
the pond where Thoreau had rowed her in his little boat.
She went inside, shut her window, and picked up her pen to write a letter “home.”
But the letter “home” was not to her mother or brother or sister. It was to her old friend in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She told him of the siege, the devastation. He had been to Rome once, he would understand her sadness at this city she loved, desecrated.
In the years she had known him, there had been conflict in their relationship, interruption and distance
but so much more
intellectual kinship, sparks, growth, fire
They had changed each other and they knew it
Now, as worry tore at her heart,
She picked up her pen.
“Love me all you can,” she wrote
“let me feel that—
amid the fearful agitations of the world,
there are pure hands with healthful even pulse,
stretched out towards me,
if I claim their grasp.”
In one of the darkest hours of her life, Margaret returned in her mind to the green fields and blue skies of Concord that she had seen so many years ago as a young woman just beginning a whole new chapter of her life.
The fields and the rivers of this town were far away from the ramparts of Rome but they lived still inside her--
a reminder of strength and serenity which she needed so much in these desperate days.
Margaret Fuller would never return herself to walk these fields nor float down these rivers.
She would die with her husband and infant son in a shipwreck as they sailed back to America.
She would never return. But we can walk this land, watch the river, see the sky overhead. And perhaps, as we do, we’ll hear the whisper of her voice in our ear
* * * * *
“Try,” she says, “dare,” she says.
Care with all you have in you about this world, its suffering, its beauty.
Do it. Dare it. Wrestle it. Struggle it. Suffer it. Work. Act. Be.
Lose your heart to something, an idea, a person, a child.
Lose your heart, again and again.
This is it. One Life. One World, No other.
Make of your life an extraordinary generous seeking.
“Give it your all,” she whispers to us. “That’s what I did.”
Copyright@Jenny M. Rankin 2010.