Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. Vol. 1 The Private Years by Charles CapperReview by: Charlene AvalloneLegacy, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1995), pp. 153-154Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679174 .

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Charlene Avallone

Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. Vol. 1 The Private Years.

By Charles Capper. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 423 pp. $39.95

Reviewed by Charlene Avallone, University of Notre Dame

The first volume of Charles Capper's

biography represents Margaret Fuller as

an avant-garde intellectual leader, fully the peer of her American Romantic

contemporaries. This approach claims

Fuller's central significance in Ameri can cultural history as no earlier biogra

phy has done. Capper's study emerges as the authoritative account of Fuller's

early life for its original and timely

scholarship, rich historical texture, and

balanced interpretations. Capper writes

in an engaging style that gives vitality to

the life of thought he chronicles.

Capper's Fuller is familiar in profile: intense in temperament; shaped in

childhood by her statesman father's

training in the classics and by the more

remote example of her mother's domes

ticity and love of natural beauty; pre cocious in physical and intellectual

development; and subject to crushes,

headaches, and wide fluctuations be tween self-doubt and apparent arro

gance. Familiar, too, is the outline of

the path that took her through fe male seminaries and New England so

cial circles to become an innovative

teacher, translator, promoter of Euro

pean Romanticism, feminist leader with

her Conversations, Transcendentalist, and early woman editor of the Dial. To

these familiar outlines, Capper brings rich detail from his researches in origi nal documents and social history, evok

ing complex nuance in Fuller's char

acter and career. His reading of family letters informs the first considered

analysis of Margaret Fuller's political and class attitudes stemming from her

"inherited liberal Whiggery" (314).

Through serious attention to women's

manuscript journals and to Fuller's juve nilia, Capper provides extraordinary

insight into her intellectual life. He

incorporates scholarship on women's

history to stage this woman's life as

"moral drama" of her transition "from a

'private' life... to the life of a 'public'

personage" in the context of social

change (xi). This volume leaves Fuller in her thirtieth year at the turning point of that transition, reserving for the

biography's second volume her final

decade's adventures as world traveler, author, feminist advocate, reform jour nalist, war correspondent, revolution

ary, lover, and mother. In claiming Fuller's unique impor

tance as an intellectual, the biography draws on Ann Douglas's model of Ante bellum culture, which largely equates women's culture with debased, "narcis sistic" sentimentality and subsumes in

tellectuality under masculine accom

plishments, achieveable only by the

exceptional woman {TheFeminization

of American Culture, 1977, 400, n.

86). Fuller's own dismissive comments about some female authors and some

forms of the sentimental, along with her social competitiveness with other

LEGACY, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1995. Copyright ? 1995 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

153

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Legacy

women, partially support Douglas's model of culture, as Capper illus

trates. Yet her association of extravagant sentimental modes with prominent

male writers?William Prescott, Rich

ard Henry Dana, and Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow?calls for modification of

the paradigm's gendered contours at

least as much as any excesses of

women's culture.

While the biography profitably draws

on more revisionist women's history,

operations of this cultural paradigm risk devaluing other women as think

ers, dissociating them from Fuller. Epi thets subordinate women's thought to

male tradition, labeling Mme. de Stael a "Rousseauist novelist" and Fanny

Wright an "Owenite socialist," and cit

ing Anna Jameson's "Wordsworthian

opinions," much as Fuller herself had

earlier been dismissed as an Emer

sonian disciple (91, 294, 144). This model of intellectual tradition not only obscures women's active participation, but also forestalls comparisons of their

thinking, here, for example, of Jame son's and de Stael's pioneering female

cultural criticism with Fuller's own, or

of Wright's and Fuller's engagement of

classic republicanism. Other women

are also represented as lesser counter

points to Fuller's greater intellectual

status. The Grimkes and Fanny Wright

appear as public speakers, "ideologues rather than intellectuals"; Lydia Maria

Child as an "abolitionist writer" among other "locally well-known female writ

ers"; Elizabeth Peabody as a lesser

teacher and conversationalist, her writ

ing characterized by "ponderousness"

(294, 292, 297). Such partial portrai ture risks reinforcing Fuller's stereotypi cal isolation as what Elaine Showalter

calls the American Dark Lady, the sole woman intellectual singled out in each

historical period as worthy of recogni tion {Sister's Choice, 1991). Fuller's stature as a preeminent Romantic intel

lectual need not entail diminishing other women's different accomplish ments in their writing?Wright's Sarah

Grimke's greater capacity for class

analysis, Elizabeth Peabody's capacity for more systematic engagement of

European theology and philosophy, or

Child's capacity for race analysis and

her contemporary reputation as a pio

neering American author in several

genres (historical romance, domestic

manual, women's history and biogra

phy, transcendental novel). Showing

something of the varied stances in

these authors writings' on women's

intellectual development or social posi tion could be as illuminating as

the careful discrimination Capper of

fers between varieties of transcenden

talism expressed by Fuller and her male

associates.

To register such criticisms might be to cavil, in light of all the praise that this

biography deserves, were it not for its

likely influence. Capper's biography is

so good in so many ways that it

probably will serve as a pattern for

other biographers seeking to reassess

women subjects, as well as the author

ity on Fuller's life for many years to

come.

154

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