Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
still continued her intellectual development, reading German philosophers and
European Romantics, publishing the essay “In Defense of Brutus” (1834) in Boston
Daily Advertiser, and translating Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832)
Torquato Tasso (1833). These activities were disrupted when her father died
of cholera and Fuller was made responsible for supporting her mother and eight
siblings. She taught at Bronson Alcott’s progressive-minded, co-educational Boston
Temple School. After that school closed, Fuller taught at the Greene Street School in
Providence, Rhode Island. She also maintained her literary ambitions, publishing
essays and translations in Boston and the Western Messenger.
Once freed from her familial responsibilities, Fuller returned to Cambridge
where she supported herself and promoted other Boston and Cambridge women’s
intellectual growth holding “Conversations” on such rigorous subjects as Greek
mythology, ethics, philosophical idealism, and women’s rights. She became
interested in the utopian community of Brook Farm and joined a circle of social
reformers, including Lydia Maria Child, and of Transcendentalists, including
Emerson and Thoreau. With Emerson, she founded the Transcendentalist
journal The Dial and served as its editor from 1840 to 1842. The next year, The
Dial published Fuller’s groundbreaking essay “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus
Men. Woman versus Women” (1843). Drawing upon Transcendentalist ideas on
nature, the spirit, self-perfection, and true creation, as well as displaying her wideranging
scholarship in European literature and culture, this essay prophesied
true independence for women, once freed from limiting patriarchal systems and
institutions with their false and hierarchical gender divisions.
After traveling around the Great Lakes and what was then the far Western
frontier, Fuller published Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844); a collection of her
poetry; travel sketches; and thoughts on the detriments of industrialization, women’s
survival on the frontier, injustices to the Native Americans and other subjects. On the
strength of this book, Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, oered her
a position as its literary editor. She became an inuential literary critic, publishing
over 250 pieces during the four years she worked there, and bringing notice to Poe,
Hawthorne, Melville, and Frederick Douglass, among others. She also brought notice
to ill treatment of the disabled, the insane, and the imprisoned.
She enlarged her essay “The Great Lawsuit” into the book-length Woman in
the Nineteenth Century (1845). In it, she advocated physical, mental, and spiritual
equality for women, including freeing women from marriage as an economic
necessity. She also paralleled the patriarchal oppression of women with that of
slaves. Praised by Lydia Maria Child and later by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
B. Anthony, the book is now considered a landmark in feminist thought in America.
In 1846, she traveled to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New-York
Tribune. She became a staunch supporter of Italian unication, or Risorgimento.
She worked in a hospital for wounded revolutionaries ghting for the (ultimatelyfailed)
independent Roman Republic sought by the Giuseppe Mazzini. She also fell
in love with a fellow supporter of Mazzini, the Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.
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