fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007 - Ethical Culture ...

about the baby, whom she had hardly seen since he was two monthsold. After Rome fell to the French on the fourth of July she madeher way to Rieti, only to find that the nurse, assuming the babyhad been abandoned, was allowing him to starve. Retreating toFlorence with Ossoli and the baby, Fuller faced down her shockedacquaintances, including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,and began work on her history of the Roman Republic. While atFlorence she may have married Ossoli, as his sister later claimed. InMay 1850, she sailed for the United States with Ossoli and the baby,full of forebodings about the ship and the way they would be receivedat home. All three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, onJuly 19. The body of the baby was washed ashore as well as a trunkthat contained some of Fuller’s papers but not the history. Thoreausought in vain for her body.Emerson, Clarke, and Channing edited Fuller’s Memoirs (1852) in away that sanitized her personal life, denigrated her accomplishmentsas a writer, and slighted her lifelong activism. In 1903 her friendJulia Ward Howe published her love letters to James Nathan, therebysealing the image of Fuller as a would‐be intellectual, willful andfoolish in her personal entanglements. Hawthorne’s old verdictseemed confirmed: “There never was such a tragedy as her wholestory; the sadder and sterner, because so much of the ridiculous wasmixed up with it, and because she could bear anything better thanto be ridiculous.”Sexist ridicule dies hard, and in Fuller’s case its death was retardedby the long inaccessibility of most of her writings. The Fullerbibliography included in this volume shows that her writingsnow, in the 1990s, are fast coming back into print—an excellentedition of her letters, a collection of her dispatches to the Tribunefrom Europe, an annotated edition of her Woman in the NineteenthCentury, and a generous anthology of her writings. The substantial“popular” biography of 1990 was followed in 1992 by the meticulouslyresearched first volume of a projected two‐volume scholarly biography.The evidence is at hand that may at last establish Fuller’s candidacyfor serious consideration as what Hawthorne said mockingly, “thegreatest, wisest, best woman of the age.”The Great LawsuitMAN versus MEN. WOMAN versus WOMEN[Four Kinds of Equality]Where the thought of equality has become pervasive, it showsitself in four kinds.The household partnership. In our country the woman looksfor a “smart but kind” husband, the man for a “capable, sweettempered” wife,The man furnishes the house, the woman regulates it. Theirrelation is one of mutual esteem, mutual dependence. Their talkis of business, their affection shows itself by practical kindness.They know that life goes more smoothly and cheerfully to eachfor the other’s aid; they are grateful and content. The wifepraises her husband as a “good provider,” the husband in returncompliments her as a “capital housekeeper.” This relation isgood as far as it goes.Next comes a closer tie which takes the two forms, either ofintellectual companionship, or mutual idolatry. The last, wesuppose, is to no one a pleasing subject of contemplation. Theparties weaken and narrow one another; they lock the gateagainst all the glories of the universe that they may live in a celltogether. To themselves they seem the only wise, to all otherssteeped in infatuation, the gods smile as they look forward tothe crisis of cure, to men the woman seems an unlovely siren,to women the man an effeminate boy.The other form, of intellectual companionship, has becomemore and more frequent. Men engaged in public life, literarymen, and artists have often found in their wives companionsand confidants in thought no less than in feeling. And, as inthe course of things the intellectual development of womanhas spread wider and risen higher, they have, not unfrequently,shared the same employment. As in the case of Roland andhis wife, who were friends in the household and the nation’scouncils, read together, regulated home affairs, or preparedpublic documents together indifferently.It is very pleasant, in letters begun by Roland and finished byhis wife, to see the harmony of mind and the difference ofnature, one thought, but various ways of treating it.This is one of the best instances of a marriage of friendship. Itwas only friendship, whose basis was esteem; probably neitherparty knew love, except by name.Roland was a good man, worthy to esteem and be esteemed,his wife as deserving of admiration as able to do without it.Madame Roland is the fairest specimen we have yet of her class,as clear to discern her aim, as valiant to pursue it, as Spenser’sBritomart, austerely set apart from all that did not belong toher, whether as woman or as mind. She is an antetype of aclass to which the coming time will afford a field, the Spartanmatron, brought by the culture of a book‐furnishing age tointellectual consciousness and expansion.Self‐sufficing strength and clear‐sightedness were in hercombined with a power of deep and calm affection. The pageof her life is one of unsullied dignity.Her appeal to posterity is one against the injustice of thosewho committed such crimes in the name of liberty. She makesit in behalf of herself and her husband. I would put beside it onthe shelf a little volume, containing a similar appeal from theverdict of contemporaries to that of mankind, that of Godwinin behalf of his wife, the celebrated, the by most men detestedMary Wolstonecraft. In his view it was an appeal from theinjustice of those who did such wrong in the name of virtue.Were this little book interesting for no other cause, it wouldbe so for the generous affection evinced under the peculiarcircumstances. This man had courage to love and honor this233