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This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham]On: 18 November 2014, At: 15:56Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journalPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20
Classical Daughters: ElizabethBarrett Browning and MargaretFullerISOBEL HURST aa Goldsmiths, University of LondonPublished online: 19 Apr 2011.
To cite this article: ISOBEL HURST (2011) Classical Daughters: Elizabeth BarrettBrowning and Margaret Fuller, Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, 40:4,448-468, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2011.561746
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Women’s Studies, 40:448–468, 2011Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00497878.2011.561746
CLASSICAL DAUGHTERS: ELIZABETH BARRETTBROWNING AND MARGARET FULLER
ISOBEL HURST
Goldsmiths, University of London
At fourteen, Elizabeth Barrett asserted confidently in the prefaceto her poem The Battle of Marathon, a brief but ambitious epic onthe fall of a great city, that “a female” might conspicuously dis-play her intellectual and poetic inclinations without attracting anepithet she considered “equivocal”:
Now even the female may drive her Pegasus through the realms ofParnassus, without being saluted with the most equivocal of all appel-lations, the learned lady; without being celebrated by her friends as aSappho, or traduced by her enemies as a pedant; without being abusedin the Review, or criticized in society. (Battle vi)
Her assurance was misplaced: not only was she to be classified as alearned lady, but an American contemporary was still more equiv-ocally categorized: “Humanity is divided into Men, Women andMargaret Fuller” (Edgar Allan Poe, qtd. in Miller 192). ElizabethBarrett (later Browning, 1806–1861) and Margaret Fuller (laterOssoli, 1810–1850) encountered each other only a short timebefore Fuller’s death, but their writings and their public personaswere central to a transatlantic conversation on the intellectual abil-ities of women and their relationship to literature and history. Thefirst lived quietly in the English countryside, followed by a longperiod of seclusion and ill health in her father’s London house
An earlier version of this article was presented at the “Domesticating the Classics inNineteenth-Century England and America” panel at Feminism & Classics V: Bringing It AllBack Home (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, May 2008). I would like to thank YopiePrins for inviting me to contribute a paper to this panel.
Address correspondence to Isobel Hurst, Department of English and ComparativeLiterature, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK. E-mail:[email protected]
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller 449
and an elopement to Italy with Robert Browning. The other grewup in New England, and was closely connected to the HarvardUnitarian circles in which Transcendentalism developed. Yet theyshared a formative educational experience—the study of “mas-culine” subjects such as Latin and Greek, largely undertaken athome. For Barrett Browning and other Victorian women writers,such separation from the typical concerns of their female peerswas part of a literary training1; for the more isolated Fuller itwas an enforced and painful alienation from American models offemininity, which seemed particularly rigid to foreign observers.
A poet who wanted to join a predominantly masculine literarycanon founded on classical literature, Elizabeth Barrett was estab-lished early in her career as a prodigy. R. H. Horne wrote of herin A New Spirit of the Age (1844) that it would not be surprising tohear scholars a hundred years in the future
expressing shrewd doubts as to whether such an individual as Miss E.B.Barrett had ever really existed. Letters and notes, and exquisite Englishlyrics, and perhaps a few elegant Latin verses, and spirited translationsfrom Aeschylus, might all be discovered under that name; but this wouldnot prove that such a lady had ever dwelt among us. (2: 132–133)
She privately refuted some of Horne’s account: “I am not a greatletter writer, and I don’t write ‘elegant Latin verses,’ as all the godsof Rome know, and I have not been shut up in the dark for sevenyears by any manner of means” (Letters 1: 174). Horne takes painsto stress that Barrett’s learning does not make her unwomanly:“Although she has read Plato, in the original, from beginning toend, [. . .] yet there is probably not a single good romance of themost romantic kind in whose marvellous and impossible scenesshe has not delighted” (2: 135). Her poetry reflects her interest ina wide range of genres, including contemporary novels that wereless perceptively assessed by male poets such as Robert Browningand Matthew Arnold. Like the novelists she whose writing sheemulates in Aurora Leigh, she developed a “strong conviction thatthe responsibility of the woman poet was to confront and namethe condition of women” (Cooper 123). She was also increasingly
1See Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics.
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450 Isobel Hurst
concerned to produce poetry which engaged with the contempo-rary world, protesting the occupation of Italy by foreign forcesand the mistreatment of child workers in English factories (“TheCry of the Children” has an epigraph from Euripides’s Medea inGreek). Barrett gradually moved away from the classics after herearly preoccupation with scholarship, yet her passion for Greekliterature is discernible in most of her works.
For an ambitious woman in the nineteenth century, a clas-sical education might appear to be an initiation into knowledgewhich was usually withheld from her sex: in George Eliot’s famousphrase, “a standing-ground from which all truth might be seenmore truly” (62). Margaret Fuller does not describe her studiesin this way. Her father taught her Latin and encouraged her toidentify with the masculine Roman values and republican ideol-ogy of liberty and civic virtue that pervaded nineteenth-centuryAmerican culture. He required her to express her opinions clearlyand unequivocally, and would not allow her to use the self-deprecating expressions that characterized women’s speech. Sherepresents her studies as a painful experience leading to gen-der confusion, which only got worse when at twelve she was sentto a boarding school to acquire “feminine graces” (Nicolay 79).These educational principles helped to shape a mind which wasrepeatedly described (by herself and others) as androgynous—atbest curious, at worst monstrous. Nevertheless, her unique statuscould also work to her advantage. Fuller was the first woman to beallowed to use Harvard’s library: Thomas Wentworth Higginsonrecalled that he had seen her “day after day, under the covertgaze of the undergraduates who had never before looked upona woman reading within those sacred precincts” (194).
In seeking models for a life which might allow her to exercisethe intelligence and energy her contemporaries characterized asmasculine, and yet to establish her distinctively feminine genius,Fuller looked to the same European examples as did ElizabethBarrett and Marian Evans (George Eliot). In “To George Sand:A Desire” (1844), Barrett reverses the stereotypical attribution ofintellect and emotion to hail the “large-brained woman and large-hearted man/Self-called George Sand!” When she arrived in Paris,Fuller achieved her long-held ambition of meeting Sand; heraccount of their conversation encouraged the Brownings to makea visit of their own after Fuller’s death. The heroine of Germaine
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller 451
de Staël’s Corinne, ou l ’Italie (1807) was another potent inspiration,a beautiful poet whose improvised political and prophetic verse israpturously received by the public. Dressed as the Cumaean Sibyl,she speaks from the Capitol and is rewarded with a laurel crown.W. H. Channing accused Fuller of “affecting the part of a YankeeCorinna” (Chevigny 88), and the character of the improvisatricedoes seem to fit Fuller, whose contemporaries observed that shewas far more compelling as a speaker than as a writer. Corinne is acomplex figure: she appears to be both English and Italian, mas-culine and feminine, prophet and sibyl; she belongs to the chillynorth and the warm south. The novel’s extended lyrical descrip-tions of landscape, literature, and art pay tribute to an Italy thatnurtures the creative impulses of the woman artist. In her hybridnovel-epic, Aurora Leigh (1857), Barrett Browning creates a poetwho, like Corinne, is the daughter of an English father and Italianmother. Following William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850) inher focus on the growth of a poet’s mind, Barrett Browningchooses a woman writer as her epic hero. Aurora, who teachesherself Latin and Greek from her father’s books, resembles bothBarrett Browning and Fuller in evading gendered restrictions andescaping to a more liberating existence in Italy.
When Barrett Browning and Fuller met in Italy in the late1840s, each had observed revolutionary uprisings in Italian citiesand written about them sympathetically, though with very differ-ent approaches. Their ideas of Italy and hopes for the liberationand unification of the country drew on classical literature aswell as the more recent influence of writers like Byron and deStaël. Despite the differences in their education and politics, bothBarrett Browning and Fuller turned to classical literature for inspi-ration when they engaged with the idea of liberty in relation to therevolutions they observed in Italy and to the problem of “womanin the nineteenth century.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
All this time, and indeed the greater part of my life, we lived [. . .]in a retirement scarcely broken to me except by books and my ownthoughts. [. . .] There I had my fits of Pope—& Byron—& Coleridge—and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the
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Bodleian—gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists — & eat [sic] &drank Greek & made my head ache with it. (Diary by E.B.B. xix)
Barrett’s description of voracious, intoxicating and painfullyintense reading at home “contrasts sharply the private and furtivefemale experience of classics with the public, library-bound read-ing undertaken by men” (Wallace 331). Hers is a life shaped byliterature: Deirdre David observes that “almost all her writing isgenerated by the reading and writing of other texts” (101). Shedid not come from a scholarly family: her father had had an irreg-ular and limited education, but he encouraged his daughter towrite and study, and supplied her with books (Dennis 32). Hermother heard the boys recite their Latin grammar lessons andnurtured her eldest daughter’s passion for epic with Homer inAlexander Pope’s translation and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Asin other families with a daughter followed by sons, the first boy(Edward, usually referred to as “Bro”) had a tutor who taughthim Latin and Greek as a preparation for formal schooling andhis sister was allowed to share his lessons so that she could teachtheir younger brothers. The routine learning of Latin grammarreceives little attention in Barrett’s autobiographical writing, butGreek is alluring and exhilarating from the first: “To comprehendeven the Greek alphabet was delight inexpressible” (Brownings’Correspondence 1: 350). For her the point of learning the languagewas to be able to read Greek literature—she claimed that she hadaspired to learn Greek “for Homer’s sake [. . .] that is for poetry’sgenerally” (Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford1: 340), and she was reading the Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid in theoriginal languages by the age of fourteen. Her preference forGreek authors and distaste for Latin literature reflect a Romanticaesthetic in which originality and the primitive were highly valued,and Virgil was treated as not merely an inferior imitator of Homerbut also an imperial propagandist. She regarded Latin as cold, andfound it as impossible to make herself appreciate the Aeneid as toforce herself to like the taste of olives (Brownings’ Correspondence2: 107). However, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is more pleasurably associ-ated with a childhood love of mythology, which she represents asanticipating Christian sentiments:
Who loved Rome’s wolf, with demi-gods at suck,Or ere we loved truth’s own divinity,—
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Who loved, in brief, the classic hill and brook,And Ovid’s dreaming tales. . . (Casa Guidi Windows 1: 1193–1196)
She began with the ambition to be a “good linguist” (Brownings’Correspondence 1: 355), and when her brother went to school,he wrote letters explaining the principles of composition so thatshe could continue to compete with him. She also found men-tors outside the family, Sir Uvedale Price (the author of an essayon the modern pronunciation of Greek and Latin) and theblind scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, to whom she read Greek texts.These “golden hours” are commemorated in her poem “Wine ofCyprus,” dedicated to Boyd:
And I think of those long morningsWhich my thought goes far to seek,When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek. (65–68)
Boyd advised her to translate Prometheus Bound; they dis-cussed details of syntax and vocabulary and compared opin-ions on notable classical scholars such as Bentley and Porson(Drummond 518–524). However, she (like other distinguishedfemale Hellenists, such as George Eliot and Jane Ellen Harrison)found that her unsystematic approach to Greek left her vulner-able to criticism by male scholars. She alludes in Aurora Leighto “lady’s Greek/Without the accents” (2: 76–77), although AliceFalk points out that “Shelley, Peacock, and Robert Browning [. . .]were equally content to drop accents when quoting out of school”(91). In 1831, she writes of reading Aeschylus for her own inter-est and at the same time learning basic verbs in order to teachher brothers: “It certainly was disgraceful that I who can readGreek with some degree of fluency should <<have>> been suchand so long an ignoramus about the verbs” (Diary by E.B.B. 23–24). Barrett later felt that she had spent too much time tryingto become a linguist, and became increasingly concerned aboutthe usefulness of conventional classical scholarship, which wasbased on grammar and largely ignored content, as a training inliterary appreciation. She suggested that women should try toappreciate the richness of English literature before learning otherlanguages.
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In “Wine of Cyprus,” Barrett invokes classical and patris-tic authors and their characteristics as if talking to Boyd aboutmutual friends: “Our Euripides, the human/With his droppingsof warm tears,” “my Plato, the divine one,” “your Chrysostom, youpraised him/As a liberal mouth of gold” (89–90, 97, 105–106).Her diaries and letters make reference to many authors, includingEuripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Callimachus, Epictetus, Meleager,and Moschus, as well as some who were not usually studied in thenineteenth century, such as Theocritus and Nonnus. Allusions tothe ancient world in Aurora Leigh also reflect the poet’s extensiveself-education in the classics: Aurora mentions Theophrastus (alsoa favorite with George Eliot), Plato, Pindar, Aeschylus, Horace,Longus, Claudius Aelianus, and Proclus. Barrett read many ofthese texts in the original languages: in 1832 she finished read-ing Euripides’s Andromache and commented “I have now readevery play of Æschylus Sophocles & Euripides. I must go quitethro’ with Pindar next” (Diary by E.B.B. 229). She published twotranslations of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and passages fromHomer, Bion, and Theocritus (Drummond; Wallace 333–336). AsYopie Prins has suggested, the second version of Prometheus Boundwas closely connected with Barrett’s developing relationship withRobert Browning: “as love develops between the two poets, theyincreasingly translate Aeschylus’ text into the context of theircourtship [. . .] to justify eloping together” (435).
Aurora describes her father’s teaching her Latin and Greeknot as a deliberate attempt to treat her like a son, but as an act oflove based on his own limited resources. “He wrapt his little daugh-ter in his large/Man’s doublet, careless did it fit or no” (AuroraLeigh 1: 727–728) because he had nothing else to give:
like any manWho loves but one, and so gives all at once,Because he has it, rather than becauseHe counts it worthy. (1: 719–722)
After his death, she is sent from Italy to England and experiencesa “violent fall into gender.” Her aunt gives her a more convention-ally feminine upbringing, which she attempts to counteract by her“furtive self-education” from her father’s books (Gilbert 201–202):
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I read much. What my father taught beforeFrom many a volume, Love re-emphasizedUpon the self-same pages: TheophrastGrew tender with the memory of his eyes,And Ælian made mine wet. (Aurora Leigh 1: 710–714)
Years later she considers selling the volumes to finance her new lifein Italy, but cannot sacrifice the sentimental associations evoked bythe crumpled pages of Proclus. Instead she surrenders her Platoand yet more willingly abandons the work of the “kissing Judas”F. A. Wolf, whose Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) she regards as aheretical questioning of the authorship and unity of the Homericepics (5: 1246).
Margaret Fuller
One of the most striking aspects of Fuller’s study of the clas-sics is that her father, influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideason the education of women, devoted himself to training hiseldest daughter. When he had sons he did not involve himself intheir education to the same extent. A Harvard Classics graduate,Timothy Fuller taught his daughter subjects which were usuallyreserved for boys, including Latin and some Greek (and, likeBarrett, she later justified her classical learning by tutoring heryounger brothers). Looking back in an autobiographical sketchshe wrote after her father was dead, she criticized his teachingmethods and emphasized her mental and physical suffering.2 Sherecalls that she was set as many tasks as possible within a day, onsubjects she describes as beyond her age; she was required to recitelessons when her father returned from the office. Her accountof the anguish caused by her education is intense: “I had toomuch strength to be crushed,—and since I must put on the fet-ters, could not submit to let them impede my motions. My ownworld sank deep within, away from the surface of my life; in what I
2Her resentment recalls one of the period’s negative images of women’s relation-ship with classical studies, Milton’s daughters being required to read Latin, Greek andHebrew texts to their father without understanding those languages. Elizabeth Barrettwrote of a “Miss Nelly something” whose father “had amused himself by teaching herthe Greek character[s], & had made her read the Hecuba thro’, without, of course, herunderstanding a word” (Diary by E.B.B. 58).
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did and said I learned to have reference to other minds” (Memoirs1: 18). The language of confinement and compression that sheuses is paradoxically similar to the terms in which other writersdepict women’s frustration at being limited to the performance ofdomestic routines. She suggests that late hours and excessive men-tal stimulation caused her to have nightmares. Sometimes thesenightmares had a literary source: “One of these dreams I shallnever forget—I was wading in a sea of blood—I caught at twigsand rocks to save myself: they all streamed blood on me—Thisfancy was attributed at the time to my incessant reading of Virgil”(Essential Margaret Fuller 5).
Accounts of Fuller’s education stress her privileged situation,her unusually rigorous home education combined with intermit-tent formal schooling (in part at the Cambridge Port PrivateGrammar School, where girls learned Latin), her childhoodin close contact with the intellectual community surroundingHarvard, and the relatively leisured existence of her class. Hercomplaints that her intensive education caused her ill healthand mental distress have been questioned by critics who pointout that her workload was no greater than that of many boys inHarvard-influenced circles (Capper Life 1: 31; Tonkovich 14–18).She began learning Latin at the age of six, with an emphasis on thelinguistic accuracy and composition in which Barrett felt herself tobe lacking:
I was trained to quite a high degree of precision. I was expected to under-stand the mechanism of the language thoroughly and in translating togive the thoughts in as few well-arranged words as possible, and withoutbreaks or hesitation,—for with these my father had absolutely no patience.(Memoirs 1: 17)
Timothy Fuller was clearly an exacting tutor, “a man of busi-ness, even in literature” (Essential Margaret Fuller 26). When hebecame a member of Congress and was absent from home forlong periods, he wrote letters to his daughter in Latin, requiredher to reply in the same language, and critiqued her compositions.She also translated English texts into Latin and was rewarded foraccuracy—she received a dollar for translating Oliver Goldsmith’spoem The Deserted Village into Latin (Stern 210). By the age often, she had read most of Virgil, Caesar, and Cicero, and withina couple of years, Horace, Livy, and Tacitus.
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She learned to appreciate Latin literature far more thanBarrett did, reading Virgil incessantly, praising the satirical realismof Horace and finding in Ovid “a view into the enchanted gardensof the Greek mythology” (Memoirs 1: 21). Her understanding ofLatin was “exceptional” and her knowledge of classical mythology“comprehensive” (Cleary 40). Rome provided “daily food duringthose plastic years” (Memoirs 1: 18), and became associated in hermind with a force of character based on
what a man can become, not by yielding himself freely to impressions,not by letting nature play freely through him, but by a single thought, anearnest purpose, an indomitable will, by hardihood, self-command, andforce of expression. [. . .] Man present in nature, commanding nature toosternly to be inspired by it, standing like the rock amid the sea, or movinglike the fire over the land, either impassive, or irresistible; knowing not thesoft mediums or fine flights of life, but by the force which he expresses,piercing to the centre. (1: 18–19)
She later connected the inflexibility she attributes to the Romanswith the character of the father who presented them to her.Jeffrey Steele argues that by “equating her father’s instruction withthe ethos of Rome” she developed “a critique of the ideologicalfoundations of manhood in antebellum America” (27–28).
Fuller’s later uneasiness with the masculine values she hadinternalized in childhood did not involve a complete rejectionof Rome. Ovid allowed her a gratifying escape “from the humof the forum, and the mailed clang of Roman speech, to theseshifting shows of nature, these Gods and Nymphs born of thesunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill” (1: 21). The mythol-ogy of the Metamorphoses satisfied a Romantic sense of connectionbetween humanity and nature that she did not find in more aus-tere Latin authors. Her taste for Ovid was shared by other youngAmerican women: those from “progressive New England fami-lies,” such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ellen Emerson, readthe Metamorphoses in Latin. After 1855 a wider audience encoun-tered the poem through “bowdlerized translations” in ThomasBulfinch’s The Age of Fable (Winterer 153–154). They would haveencountered comparably selective iconography “on all sides, oncoins and official seals, [. . .] characters and events from the mythsadorned everyday objects [. . .] and were the subjects of paintingsand needlework” (Cleary 56).
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After the failure of his law practice, her father chose to retireto a farm. The isolated household, stocked with books and lit-erary periodicals, echoes the situation of Elizabeth Barrett andother women writers such as the Brontës, and Fuller took advan-tage of her opportunities for study and reflection. She read Plato(in French) and German literature, conceiving an “avant-garde”enthusiasm for the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(Capper Life 1: 128). Her literary career began with journal-ism: she became the first editor of the Transcendental journalthe Dial (1840–1842). Her most famous book, Woman in theNineteenth Century (1845), began as an essay in the Dial , “TheGreat Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman Versus Women.” She waslater invited to write literary criticism and social commentary forHorace Greeley’s New York Tribune, a move from a limited, if distin-guished, New England readership to a wider American audiencethat allowed Fuller to reinvent herself as “a national writer witha cosmopolitan conscience” (Eckel 30). She introduced RobertBrowning to American readers, and in an 1845 review she rankedElizabeth Barrett “in nobleness of conception, depth of spiritualexperience, and command of classic allusion, above any femalewriter the world has yet known.” Nevertheless, she argued thatthe poet’s frail health had injured her literary work, making itoverly erudite and insufficiently connected with “actual life” (qtd.in Chevigny 203). Barrett, Anna Jameson and Harriet Martineaureceived copies of Woman in the Nineteenth Century from Fullerbecause their writings had shown interest in the theme (vonMehren 198). Barrett disliked the book at first, but later came toadmire it: she found Fuller much more interesting in person thanin her writings, which she describes in a letter as “just naught.” Shequalifies this harsh assessment by noting that Fuller “said herselfthat they were sketches, thrown out in haste, and for the meansof subsistence, and that the sole production of hers which waslikely to represent her at all would be the history of the ItalianRevolution” (Letters 2: 59).
The death of her father left the family in a difficult financialposition, and Fuller worked as a school teacher before develop-ing a new approach to education in 1839 by establishing her“Conversations,” a kind of seminar for women. As well as beingintellectually stimulating, this was a profitable endeavor. Thefirst session was attended by twenty five women, and the cost of
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller 459
attendance was twenty dollars, “a very high price for that time”(Dall 9). The attendees belonged to the “education- and culture-conscious families and circles that abounded in Unitarian Boston”and were highly educated, “usually [. . .] through private tutor-ing, often from a sympathetic scholarly father or brother. [. . .]Almost all were multilingual (often proficient in three or morelanguages) and well read in classical and modern literature”(Capper “Fuller as Cultural Reformer” 510–511). Having workedas a teacher in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School, where experimen-tal teaching methods were used, Fuller modeled her classes on aversion of Socratic dialogue. She read Plato’s dialogues as a prepa-ration for teaching, “hop[ing] to be tuned up thereby” (qtd. inKolodny 366). She wanted to train women to think for themselvesrather than to acquire information. She announced “Women arenow taught, at school, all that men are; they run over, superfi-cially, even more studies. [. . .] But with this difference; men arecalled on, from a very early period, to reproduce all that theylearn” (Capper “Fuller as Cultural Reformer” 514). Mary Kelleyquestions the assertion that women had no opportunities of repro-ducing their learning, noting that they “performed their learningat exhibitions and examinations, in newspapers and magazines,and [. . .] within literary societies” (164).
Few of the Conversations were recorded, but Caroline Healey(later Dall) published some reports she had made on the Greekmythology series, the only series to which Fuller admitted men aswell as women (to compensate for what she saw as her limitedknowledge). The mixed class was not a great success, and Dallcommented that her notes could not convey the mental vitalityof Fuller in conversation with “one sympathetic person” or with“her young women,—a most gifted and extraordinary circle” (8).Her ideas were based on Homer, the Greek dramatists, Ovid, andHesiod, as well as some modern English and German commen-taries which informed her psychological readings of the myths.Controversially, she encouraged the participants to “denational-ize” themselves, to see classical mythology as equal to the Bible(Dall 28). For example, she maintained that “Psyche and Eveoffered comparable myths of fall and restoration” (Cole 539). Atthe first meeting, there were some objections to this perspectivefrom women who, according to Elizabeth Parker Peabody, “couldnot bear” the idea “in Christian times, by Christian ladies, that
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heathen Greeks should be envied” (Capper “Fuller as CulturalReformer” 517). These objections subsided when Fuller shiftedto a more psychological approach, considering the gods as “greatinstincts, or ideas, or facts of the internal constitutions, separated,and personified.” Of these, the one which took on the greatestsignificance for Fuller was Minerva, the embodiment of femalewisdom, “the child of Counsel and Intelligent Will,” who “had noinfancy, but sprang full-armed into being.” In response to WilliamWhite, who asked why genius was masculine and wisdom feminine,Fuller argued that
no one could find any difficulty in the fact that Genius was masculine. Itpresented itself to the mind in the full glow of power. [. . .] Wisdom waslike woman, always ready for the fight if necessary, yet never going to it; tak-ing reality as a basis, and classifying and arranging upon it all that Geniuscreates—seeing the relations and proper values of things. (Dall 77–78)
The idea that genius was masculine was, as she clarified inresponse to another male questioner, her understanding of “theGreek myth as manifest in the story of Minerva,” and not “our viewof it” (79).
In Woman in the Nineteenth Century Fuller pondered an ideathat she had articulated in the Conversations, that the fullrange of female characteristics in ancient myth showed that theancient Greeks knew more than modern Americans about women.Orestes A. Brownson commented, “She is quite sure the ancientheathens [. . .] had a juster appreciation of the dignity of women”(qtd. in Myerson 22). Fuller discusses Odysseus and Penelope,Greek women such as Aspasia and Sappho, Roman marriage(Brutus and Portia), and Greek tragic heroines. Frederic DanHuntington complained “Classical characters, and references tomythological fables, are introduced with a frequency which thebest taste would hardly sanction; but the error is often commit-ted with a gracefulness and appositeness which partially redeemit” (qtd. in Myerson 26). Fuller explains the need to investigatewomen’s lives with an allusion to Orpheus and Eurydice:
Meanwhile not a few believe, and men themselves have expressed the opin-ion, that the time is come when Eurydice is to call for an Orpheus, ratherthan Orpheus for Eurydice: that the idea of Man, however imperfectly
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brought out, has been far more so than that of Woman. (Essential MargaretFuller 252)
As her emphasis on developing the “idea” of Woman suggests,Fuller is arguing that men are already well represented in liter-ature and history, and that the “silent history” of women mustbe given a voice (Zwarg 181). This is not purely for the bene-fit of women, but to advance humanity as a whole: “By Man Imean both man and woman: these are the two halves of onethought. I lay no especial stress on the welfare of either. I believethat the development of one cannot be effected without that ofthe other” (Essential Margaret Fuller 245). With her interest in themutual dependence of the sexes, representations of marriage arean important concern: Xenophon’s portrayal of Panthea (in theCyropaedia) is described as “the most beautiful picture presentedby ancient literature of wedded love” (291). His achievementis seen as an approach to the depiction of Eurydice as well asOrpheus: “Xenophon, aiming at the ideal man, caught glimpsesof the ideal woman also” (275). She does not reject the associa-tion of women with domestic duties, provided that it is understoodthat those duties do not imply the whole of their capabilities:“Penelope is no more meant for a baker or weaver solely, thanUlysses for a cattle-herd” (265).
Italy
When Fuller travelled to Europe in 1847, Greeley engaged her towrite a series of travel letters for the Tribune, including her firstimpressions of Italy. In the area around Naples her earlier readingbegan to come to life, as she visited Pompeii and Herculaneum,ascended Vesuvius and travelled to Baiae and Capri. These siteswere familiar from her reading of Latin literature, and frommore recent texts such as Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Last Days ofPompeii (1834), which she had reviewed. She saw even the roadsshe travelled along from Naples to Rome as proof of all she hadlearned of the ancient Roman character. Rome itself she (likeother nineteenth-century Anglo-American travelers) found bewil-dering at first, since she was unable to see beyond mediaeval,baroque and modern Rome to the ancient city. As she began to
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understand “where objects and limits anciently were,” her recog-nition of “the local habitation of so many thoughts” enabled a“joyful” rejection of “the pitiful, peddling, Anglicised Rome firstviewed in unutterable dismay”:
[A]ncient and modern Rome—at first so painfully and discordantly jum-bled together, are drawn apart to the mental vision. [. . .] When this beginsto happen it is that one feels first truly at ease in Rome. Then the old Kings,the Consuls, and Tribunes, the Emperors, drunk with blood and gold, thewarriors of eagle sight and beak, return for us, [. . .] the seven hills tower,the innumerable temples glitter, and the Via Sacra swarms with triumphallife once more. (Dispatches 168)
Living in Italy freed English and American women from someof the most restrictive codes of society, particularly the idea thatwomen should not become interested in politics. As resistance toforeign rulers developed into revolutions in several Italian statesin 1848, Fuller’s travel dispatches turned into political reports;she was an energetic observer, walking around Rome and get-ting close to the violence. The most obvious ways to participatein the Italian struggle were by nursing the wounded, or by writ-ing both private letters and public poetry or articles to draw thereaders’ attention to the oppression of Italy by foreign forces.Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows was “directed primarily atan English audience” (Reynolds 99); Barrett Browing exploitedher public position for the sake of Italy and was attacked inBritain for her unfeminine subject matter (Mermin 163). Fullertook an active role during the siege of Rome, managing a hospi-tal that Florence Nightingale visited to learn about her methods.Barrett Browning acknowledged that Fuller had been “a devotedfriend of the republicans and a meritorious attendant on thehospitals,” but was shocked by her politics, calling her “one ofthe out and out Reds and scorners of grades of society” (Letters1: 428). Fuller positioned herself as an American whose inter-est in the cause of human freedom was based on a desire thatother nations share the liberty enjoyed by America. She had metMazzini, the intellectual leader of the revolutionary movementcalled Young Italy, and passionately championed his declarationof the Roman Republic (Deiss 20–25). She introduced “the PatriotChief” Garibaldi to her American readers as the defender of the
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short-lived republic (Dispatches 239). She saw her writing as morethan reporting, and was collecting material for a history of Italianliberation, but the book was lost with her when she drownedin 1850.3
The declaration of a new Roman Republic and the siege ofRome inspired comparisons with ancient Rome. Count PellegrinoRossi, the Pope’s minister, was assassinated on the steps of theSenate in November 1848 by those who hoped to force the Popeinto setting up a democratic system in the Papal States. The killerescaped, and the dagger with which Rossi was stabbed was dis-played to the crowd as “the dagger of Brutus.” Barrett Browningalluded to the assassination in the second part of Casa GuidiWindows, describing it as one of the “faults” of the revolutionaries,“an interlude/Which was not also holy, yet did come/’Twixt sacra-mental actions” (2: 540–542), a troubling reminder that Rome’sgreatness was founded on the murder of Remus by his brotherRomulus. An association with the French Revolution made Brutusa problematic figure for English writers. Robespierre and oth-ers had compared themselves to the idealized republican figuresof the Gracchi and Brutus as described by the Roman histo-rians Livy and Tacitus. In republican rhetoric, tyrannicide wasrendered heroic by the “identification of the assassins Brutusand Cassius as champions of popular liberties, the association ofJulius Caesar with monarchical tyranny and the vilification of theCaesars” (Vance 36). In Casa Guidi Windows Barrett Browning atfirst approaches Brutus obliquely by focusing on Michelangelo’sunfinished sculpture of “Rome’s sublimest homicide,” and sayingthat the reason he could not find a suitable model is that the peo-ple of Florence make convincing “gods and gladiators” but wouldnot look right as Roman heroes (1: 593, 597). This fits with a com-mon perception that modern Italians were too degenerate to bethe real heirs of ancient Rome. Rossi’s killer is seen as a mereassassin, lacking the glorious reputation that Brutus had earnedin battle:
3When Fuller fled from Rome after the fall of the Republic to the combined forcesof the Pope and the French, she caused a sensation in Anglo-Florentine society by arrivingaccompanied by Giovanni Ossoli and their son. Fuller set out for America in 1850 fromCasa Guidi, “returning to conservative New England as a figure of both political radicalismand sexual transgression” (Boggs 31).
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Rossi died silent near where Caesar died.He did not say, “My Brutus, is it thou?”But Italy unquestioned testified,“I killed him! I am Brutus. – I avow.”At which the whole world’s laugh of scorn replied,“A poor maimed copy of Brutus!”
Too much like,Indeed, to be so unlike! too unskilledAt Philippi and the honest battle-pike,To be so skilful where a man is killedNear Pompey’s statue, and the daggers strikeAt unawares i’the throat. (2: 545–555)
Fuller’s account suggests that she also saw similarities with theassassination of Julius Caesar: “The act was undoubtedly the resultof the combination of many, from the dexterity with which itwas accomplished, and the silence which ensued. [. . .] Had Rossilived to enter the Chamber, he would have seen the most terribleand imposing mark of denunciation known in the history ofnations,—the whole house, without a single exception, seated onthe benches of opposition. [. . .] For me, I never thought to haveheard of a violent death with satisfaction, but this act affected meas one of terrible justice” (Memoirs 2: 247). She was accustomed toreading the political and moral aspects of revolution and republi-canism through Roman history, and for her, Brutus representedthe highest form of republican virtue. In 1834 her father hadasked her to write a response to an article by George Bancrofton slavery in ancient Rome, in which he had depicted Brutus ascruel and avaricious, a timeserver and a dupe whose reputationas a hero was based on little more than his notoriety as an assas-sin. Fuller’s defence of Brutus’s role in the assassination of JuliusCaesar was published in the Boston Daily Advertiser and signed “J”for justice. Her evidence was drawn from Plutarch and VelleiusPaterculus (Capper Life 1: 144–145). In the Conversations she ledher students in a discussion of whether a woman could ever per-form Brutus’s “great action” and she “repelled the sentimentalismthat took away woman’s moral power of performing stern duty”(Simmons).
Although they did not share Fuller’s republican sentiments,the Brownings were fervent supporters of the liberation of Italy.
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Witnessing the revolutionary activity in Florence against Tuscany’sAustrian ruler, Barrett Browning was aware that there was littleaccurate information available to their correspondents, and theevents she recorded at the time in letters were later reworked inpoetry. Casa Guidi Windows reflects her experience as a womanwatching the political activity in the streets of Florence from 1847to 1849 from the safety of her home: she is emotionally involvedwith events but, unlike Fuller, physically detached from them. Sherelied on the newspaper reports brought home by her husband forpolitical information. Most of her attention is directed inwards asshe is preoccupied with her own visions: “The poem stations itselfas a window on history, presenting its report through a complexset of genres, poetic assumptions, and large-scale structures. [. . .]Yet despite being an eye-witness—at a window—she scarcely everlooks out” (Dillon and Frank 472). In Part I of Casa Guidi Windowsshe is preoccupied with the Italians’ need for a worthy leader.The Risorgimento is often described in terms of epic heroism,a perspective which recalls Barrett’s youthful enthusiasm in TheBattle of Marathon:
Who can be indifferent, who can preserve his tranquillity, when he hears ofone little city rising undaunted, and daring her innumerable enemies, indefence of her freedom—of a handful of men overthrowing the invaders,who sought to molest their rights and destroy their liberties? (Battle xi)
When she invokes ancient epic in Casa Guidi Windows it is onlyto demonstrate how out of place the heroic code, based on thevalues of an aristocratic warrior society, would be in the modernworld, and to provide a context for the examination of other formsof heroism. She looks forward to a time when there will be nomore fighting and a poet greater even than Homer will emerge.The poetic discourse of the past, Barrett Browning protests, hascontributed to Italy’s disempowerment by personifying “Italia” asa helpless and endangered woman with images of misery “wrapt inbeauty,” such as the bereaved mother Niobe or “sweet, fair Juliet,”that elide the underlying political reality:
[. . .] ’tis easier to gaze longOn mournful masks, and sad effigies,Than on real, live, weak creatures crushed by strong. (1: 43–48)
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The accusation that poetic imagery erases the impact of oppres-sion might also be made in the context of gender. If women couldwrite on behalf of Italy’s liberation from foreign oppression, theymight also liberate themselves from an apolitical, purely domesticexistence. Barrett Browning’s prophetic voice was not welcomedby English readers: as Fuller notes of Cassandra in Woman in theNineteenth Century, “prosaic” people show a “mixture of shameand reverence” to “the inspired child, the poet” (Essential MargaretFuller 304). Yet Cassandra, as Fuller suggests, is neither is “a mad-woman” nor “unnatural”—she is merely ahead of her time. Thepredicament of such a woman is most aptly expressed by Euripidesin the Trojan Women, whose lines perfectly anticipate the “remarks[. . .] that the world still makes in such cases.” The visionarywoman writer looks to the Greeks for an assurance that unitingmasculine and feminine qualities in a single person will eventuallybe recognized as a strength: “When the intellect and affectionsare in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep;inspiration will not be confounded with fancy. [. . .] Cassandra wasonly unfortunate in receiving her gift too soon” (303).
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