To the Edges of Ideology

IN ROME IN THE FALL OF 1847 MARGARET FULLER CELEBRATED HER DISCOVERY of the place where she felt she belonged, fearing only that she had found it too late. She wrote that Europe had validated her long-held instinct by providing at last the atmosphere, the right soil, in which she might uniquely grow. While the figure of the self, instinctual and organic, was shared by romantics on both sides of the Atlantic, the suggestion that self and place waited for reciprocal recognition is unmistakably American. Fuller's contemporaries, Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, had quite resoundingly located-found and installed-their unique voice and vision in the specifically landscape. In her years, Fuller had differed from them sharply, sharing their preference neither for nature nor for New England. The appeal for her of Europe, to be sure, lay in the social and historical rather than the natural landscape, but Fuller's of vocational discovery in European places was as intense as that her compatriots had felt in rural retreats. Italy receives me as a long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here, she wrote.2 She did not mean that she was Italian in essence; it was as an that she felt at home in Italy. The specific interest here of Fuller's situation is that she could approximate the of place only from the far side of the Atlantic Ocean; in this way, she significantly reinterprets the American sense of her peers. What is more, Fuller's American sense could not be repatriated. Her own return was balked first by her fear of recrossing and reentry, then by the abrupt and concerted discouragement of her friends, and finally by storm and shipwreck. After Fuller's death, much was written about her, but her American sense

Aesthetics · Art · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Literature and Culture · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Evolution and Science Education · History · Law

• Tropes of Suffering and Postures of Authority in Margaret Fuller's European Travel Letters

  Heidi Kolk, Heidi Aronson Kolk•Biography•2005

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• Margaret Fuller's Conversational Journalism

  Leslie Elizabeth Eckel•Arizona quarterly/ The Arizona…•2007

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