Reporting the Revolution: Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and the Italian Risorgimento

Abstract

Margaret Fuller's journalism took a radical new shape when she traveled to Europe to report on the Italian revolution in the late 1840s as foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune. As America's first woman journalist to report on a major international revolution, Fuller established herself as the primary source of information on the Italian Revolution, a role that grew out of her bold social reform writing for the Tribune that exposed institutional and government corruption. Her compassion for the populist Italian uprising known as the Risorgimento would significantly overlap with that of Herman Melville. Both writers viewed the plight of the Risorgimento as a representation of social progress instructive for an American audience. Unlike their contemporaries, Fuller and Melville did not use the Italian revolution as an opportunity to glorify America's own revolutionary struggle for a republic, but instead measured it against the shortcomings of their nation's democratic ideals.

Notes

Margaret Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 138. For more on this principle of the periodical press as a vehicle for social justice, see Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves, eds., “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837–1916 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001).

Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 41.

Melville's reporting to the American antebellum public about his impressions of Europe was not confined to the lectern. Each of his speeches was covered so thoroughly by newspapers at the time that Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts was able to reconstruct “Melville's various lecture engagements between 1857 and 1860 …from all the [contemporary] newspaper reports found by the 1850s,” Pursuing Melville, 1940–1980: Chapters and Essays by Merton M. Sealts Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 58. Most reports liberally excerpted so many different long passages verbatim from three of his lectures, “Statues in Rome,” “The South Seas,” and “Traveling,” that it was possible to reassemble each as a coherent whole. Print journalism functioned to amplify Melville's lectures, as with Emerson's lectures, to a mass newspaper reading audience, thus placing him in a similar role to Fuller insofar as he was making sense of politics overseas for an antebellum American newspaper reading public.

[Charles Gordon Greene], “Literary Notices,” Boston Post, February 28, 1845, 1.

[Charles Gordon Greene], [Review of Moby-Dick], Boston Post, November 12, 1850, 1.

Robert J. Scholnick, “‘The Ultraism of the Day’: Greene's Boston Post, Hawthorne, Fuller, Melville, Stowe, and Literary Journalism in Antebellum America,” American Periodicals 18, no. 2 (2008): 187.

Margaret Fuller, Essays on American Life and Letters, ed. Joel Myerson (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2003 [1978]), 366.

Dennis Berthold, “Italy, the Civil War, and the Politics of Friendship,” Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 139.

Hershel Parker, “Historical Note VI,” in Published Poems, Herman Melville, ed. Robert C. Ryan et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 2009), 432.

Herman Melville, Published Poems, ed. Robert C. Ryan et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 2009), 433–434.

For more on Fuller's correspondence in the context of the Tribune's innovative coverage of international politics, see Ulf Jonas Bjork, “Sketches of Life and Society: Horace Greeley's Vision of Foreign Correspondence,” American Journalism 14, no. 3–4 (1997): 359–375.

John Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

John Maxwell Hamilton's Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009) provides a thorough description of the Tribune's foreign correspondence, but Fuller earns only brief mention, 59. Fuller is absent from David Nord's Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001) and appears briefly in Dicken-Garcia, 114–115. Christopher B. Daly cites her hiring as part of “a bundle of changes” Greeley pioneered in the newspaper industry, Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation's Journalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 71.

Edd Applegate, Journalistic Advocates and Muckrakers: Three Centuries of Crusading Writers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 68.

Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 4.

Margaret Fuller, These Sad but Glorious Days: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 217.

Margaret Fuller, “Thom's Poems,” New-York Tribune, August 22, 1845, C175. Fuller was willing to tolerate rampant piracy of her works in Europe in order to expand her reach to international women readers, Marshall, 269.

Jan Whitt's Women in American Journalism: A New History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008) is an apt collation of biographies of both famous and forgotten women journalists. Fuller receives only brief mention, however, again filtered through Greeley's perspective rather than her own remarkable radical ideological transformation, 7, 10.

Leslie Eckel, “Margaret Fuller's Conversational Journalism: New York, London, Rome,” Arizona Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2007): 27.

Robert Chadwell Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 61.

Giovanna Dell’Orto, American Journalism and International Relations: Foreign Correspondence from the Early Republic to the Digital Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 37.

Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 37.

Marshall, 269.

Hans Bergmann, God in the Street: New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 36–37.

Cornelius Mathews, qtd. in Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art, 141.

Herman Melville, White-Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1970), 400.

Berthold, “Italy,” 143.

Bergmann, 39.

Margaret Fuller, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, six volumes, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983–1994), 4:193.

Hamilton, 60–61.

Fuller, Letters, 4:213.

Mary Suzanne Shriber, Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 137.

Meg McGavran Murray, Margaret Fuller: Wandering Pilgrim (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 230.

Fuller, Sad but Glorious Days, 141.

Herman Melville, Journals, ed. Howard C. Hosford and Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1989), 100.

Melville, Journals, 101, 103.

Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 408.

Melville, Piazza Tales, 408–409.

Fuller, Letters, 5:276.

Ibid., 5:271.

Ibid., 3:199.

Fuller, These Sad but Glorious Days, 193.

Fuller, These Sad but Glorious Days, 259.

Robert K. Wallace, “‘Unlike Things Must Meet and Mate’: Melville and the Visual Arts,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 352.

William B. Dillingham, Melville's Circle: The Later Years (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 7.

Fuller, These Sad but Glorious Days, 222.

Herman Melville, At the Hostelry and Naples in the Time of Bomba, ed. Gordon Poole (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1989), 26.

Fuller, Letters, 5:201.

Ibid., 5:202.

Fuller, These Sad but Glorious Days, 29.

Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 76; Dennis Berthold, American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 98.

Berthold, American Risorgimento, 98.

Melville, At the Hostelry, 54.

Melville, Published Poems, 183.

Ibid., 184.

Fuller, Letters, 5:65.

Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 121.

Margaret Fuller, “Our City's Charities,” The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 388.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Essays: Second Series, ed. Joseph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1:205.

Fuller, “Our City's Charities,” 388.

Fuller, “Essays,” The Essential Margaret Fuller, 366.

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 290.

Fuller, Essays on American Life and Letters, 366.

Fuller, “Our City's Charities,” 389.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, J. F. Clarke, and W. H. Channing, eds., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vols. I–II (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1852), 1:306.

Murray aptly observes that Emerson's heresies in the Divinity School Address inspired Fuller's refusal of Christ, 187. Murray usefully points out that nature for Fuller thus functions like Jesus by providing access to the divine, whereby the ego vanishes in a fusion with “the currents of Universal Being,” 93. Elsewhere, Emerson appears the exorcist of Fuller's spirits she conjured in her mystical dabbling in mesmerism, animal magnetism, and gemology. Here Murray finds Fuller “deliberately countering Emerson” with “the magnetic aura” of “Mother Power” in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, casting the formation of her feminism in contrast to Emerson's aversion to her mystical inclinations, Murray, 119. David Robinson points out that such tension did not give rise to her feminist views, so much as reflect their different temperaments, “Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos,” Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Larry J. Reynolds (New York: Norton, 1998), 245. Fuller's feminist call for spiritual and professional development of women by unleashing them in the marketplace was instead modeled after Emerson's vocational liberation called for throughout his work, especially in “The Poet.”

Emerson represents a hegemonic white male patriarchal barrier to Fuller's professional development in Dorothy Berkson, “‘Born and Bred in Different Nations’: Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in Patrons and Proteges: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Marchalonis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 3–30. In the process of revising old scholarship that posited that Fuller was romantically in love with Emerson, Berkson overstates the claim that any passion for Emerson in Fuller's letters was strictly rhetorical and not genuine, 6–8. Jeffrey Steele's “Introduction,” to The Essential Margaret Fuller (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995) has Fuller consistently in opposition to Emerson, and usually forging her views by confronting or challenging his, xviii, xxxiii–iv. Paula Kopacz's “Feminist at the Tribune: Margaret Fuller as Professional Writer,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), depicts Emerson as eviscerating Fuller's feministic strains in her writing and regarding them as “unsettling masculine qualities,” 119. Kopacz claims that his Memoirs were a spiteful distortion of her life that occluded the significance of her achievements as a literary critic, 119. Susan Belasco's “‘The Animating Influences of Discord’: Margaret Fuller in 1844,” Legacy 20 (2003), usefully complicates the picture by pointing toward Fuller's transformation from transcendentalist to social critic as a function not only of gender-driven crisis and conflict, but in “defining the proper role of the scholar in a society in need of reform,” 76.

Robinson, “Fuller,” 245.

Hamilton, 224.

Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Renaissance, 78.

Herman Melville, “Billy Budd, Sailor,” The Great Short Works of Herman Melville, ed. Warner Berthoff (New York: Perennial Classics, 2004), 502–503.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 14:307.

Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Renaissance, 76.

Fuller, These Sad but Glorious Days, 254.

Ibid., 22.

Ibid., 311.