Margaret Fuller, wandering pilgrim / Meg McGavran Murray.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Murray, Meg McGavran.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authors, American--19th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Feminists--United States--Biography.

Feminists.

Fuller, Margaret, 1810-1850.

Fuller, Margaret.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (548 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller," the pioneering feminist, journalist, and political revolutionary asked herself as a child. "What does it mean?" Filled with new insights into the causes and consequences of Fuller's lifelong psychic conflict, this biography chronicles the journey of an American Romantic pilgrim as she wanders from New England into the larger world-and then back home under circumstances that Fuller herself likened to those of both the prodigal child of the Bible and Oedipus of Greek mythology. Meg McGavran Murray discusses Fuller's Puritan ancestry, her life as the precocious child of a preoccupied, grieving mother and of a tyrannical father who took over her upbringing, her escape from her loveless home into books, and the unorthodox-and influential-male and female role models to which her reading exposed her. Murray also covers Fuller's authorship of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, her career as a New-York Tribune journalist first in New York and later in Rome, her pregnancy out of wedlock, her witness of the fall of Rome in 1849 during the Roman Revolution, and her return to the land of her birth, where she knew she would be received as an outcast. Other biographies call Fuller a Romantic. Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim illustrates how Fuller internalized the lives of the heroes and heroines in the ancient and modern Romantic literature that she had read as a child and adolescent, as well as how she used her Romantic imagination to broaden women's roles in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, even as she wandered the earth in search of a home.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note to Readers

Chronology

Prologue

PART ONE: "NO NATURAL CHILDHOOD"

1 Her Father's House

2 Hungry for Love

3 "Gate of Paradise"

4 The World of Books

PART TWO: THE TRANSITION YEARS

5 Boston Schooling

6 Boarding School at Groton

7 Metamorphosis in Her Young Adulthood

8 The Influence of the Harvard Romantics

9 The Search for Self

10 The Farm in Groton

PART THREE: EMERSON, EPISTOLARY FRIEND AND GUIDE

11 The Search for a Guide

12 A Fluid Friendship

13 A "Forlorn" Boston Winter

14 Providence, Pain, and Escape into Illusion

15 "Drawn" by Fuller's Siren Song

16 Retreat from Her Siphoning Sea

PART FOUR: THE SEDUCTIVE LURE OF NATURE

17 Religious Crisis

18 A Divine Madness

19 The Siren Song of Nature

20 The Seductive Sand

21 Demonic Desires

22 "The Daemon Works His Will"

23 Redeeming Her Friendships from "Eros"

24 Mystic Cleansing

25 Paradise Regained

26 The Law of the Father and the Embrace of Mother Nature

PART FIVE: THE "FINE CASTLE" OF HER WRITING

27 A Time to Write

28 Millennial Fever

29 Fuller's Apocalypse

30 Contradictory Wishes and Dreams

31 Pilgrims and Prodigals

32 Discordant Energies

33 Mesmerism and Romantic Yearning in Summer on the Lakes

34 Mother Power, Beastly Men, and Woman in the Nineteenth Century

35 "What Is the Lady Driving At?"

PART SIX: PROFESSIONAL WOMAN, PRIVATE PASSION

36 A Divided Life

37 Fallen Women and Worldly Men

38 The Garden's Desecration

39 Narcissistic Wounds and Imaginary Mystic Entities

40 Romantic Obsession

41 A Soul-Paralyzing Pain

42 A Trust Betrayed

43 The Dark Side of Her Lot

44 "Possessed of " Her Father

45 Yearning to Wash Her Soul of Sin

46 The Ties That Bind

PART SEVEN: THE RISING TIDE OF REVOLUTION.

47 Passionate Players and Incendiary Social Conditions

48 Entering the European Stage

49 Mazzini Enters

50 Mickiewicz Enters

51 On to Lyons and Italy

52 On to Rome

53 Ossoli Enters

54 To Marry, or Not to Marry?

55 Do As the Romans Do

56 Roman Winter

57 More Rain and Revolutionaries' Conflicting Aims

58 Personal and Political Rebellions

59 A Love Higher than Law or Passion

PART EIGHT: APOCALYPTIC DREAMS AND THE FALL OF ROME

60 Harsh Reality and Apocalyptic Dreams

61 The Lull before the Storm

62 Deceit and Treachery

63 The Fall of Rome

64 Last Illusions

65 A Wayward Pilgrim Journeys Home

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

V

W

X

Y

Z.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 475-492) and index.

ISBN:

9786612726156

9780820343358

0820343358

9781282726154

1282726153

OCLC:

593297209