Margaret Fuller articulates her view of man and woman in her 1845 feminist manifesto, Woman in the 19th Century.
"By Man I mean both man and woman; these are the two halves of one thought. I lay no especial stress on the welfare of either. I believe that the development of the one cannot be effected without that of the other. My highest wish is that this truth should be distinctly and rationally apprehended, and the condition of life and freedom recognized as the same for the daughter and the sons of time; twin exponents of a divine thought." More.
John Matteson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his double biography, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (2007), will present his new biography, The Lives of Margaret Fuller (2012) today at UAlbany and the State Museum.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Man and Woman: "Two Halves of One Thought"
Neither Male Nor Female
"Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman."
--Margaret Fuller, Woman in the 19th Century (1845)
Pulitzer-winning biographer John Matteson will visit today to discuss his new biography of radical 19th century thinker Margaret Fuller who died in a shipwreck off Fire Island at the height of her powers at the age of 40.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Beginning with the End-- Biographer John Matteson
Joanna Scutts of the Washington Post writes about John Matteson's choice, as a biographer, to begin his new book with Fuller's death. Matteson visits UAlbany and the NYS Museum tomorrow.
"Matteson begins his story of Fuller’s 'lives' at the premature end. Along with her 1-year-old son and his Italian father, she was killed in a shipwreck off Fire Island, N.Y., during a freak hurricane in July 1850. She was 40 years old. By beginning with Fuller’s death — as he puts it, “Think first of endings” — Matteson purposely overshadows the book with a sense of loss. It works to subtly emphasize Fuller’s own most passionate and important theme, that human potential wasted by social injustice is no less a tragedy than death. Lost in the wreck was the manuscript of a book that might have transformed her legacy: her eyewitness account of the failed revolution in Rome in 1848-49." More.
Picture: Memorial marker for Margaret Fuller Ossoli, her husband, and their son. Located at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In Celebration of "Difficult Women"
Pulitzer-winning biographer John Matteson comes tomorrow to discuss Margaret Fuller, one of the great "difficult women" of the 19th century.
"Arrogant, condescending and vain, Fuller was (as she knew altogether too well) the best-educated American woman of her time. In The Lives of Margaret Fuller, John Matteson tells us that Ralph Waldo Emerson thought she exhibited 'an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others'; Nathaniel Hawthorne found her, as Matteson puts it, 'exquisitely irritating'; and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed her acidly. Habituated to deference from others, she was unaccustomed to dealing with people on an equal footing, and she bristled when she did not receive the respect she thought was her due."
Read more in Mary Beth Norton's review of Matteson's new book in the New York Times.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Margaret Fuller: Too Fierce to Fit In
"Fuller was the recipient of her father Timothy's ambition. A brooding thinker who was disappointed that his first child was female, Timothy gave his daughter an incredibly rigorous education that left her with nightmares and robbed her of her childhood. And though she was lauded as a prodigy, she was keenly aware as she matured that her father rued his role in developing her mind. She suffered from spinal curvature and migraines and was plain-featured, nearsighted, an unmarried mother at age 38, in love with an Italian man a decade younger and regularly criticized in private and public for her inability to be deferential in the slightest degree. Fuller was, quite simply, too fierce to fit in."
So writes Laura Skandera Trombley in a review of John Matteson's The Lives of Margaret Fuller. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer visits on 3/22.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Boozer, brawler, blasphemer, bully
Ethan Allen is an inspirational (if malleable) figure for Vermonters in general, and particularly for self-styled "free thinkers" and individualists across the political spectrum, from tea party activists to "off-the-grid" hippies.
Here's a review of Willard Sterne Randall's new biography of Allen on the Vt Digger blog by John McClaughty, VP of the libertarian thinktank, the Ethan Allen Institute:
"How one views Ethan depends a lot on one’s own preferences. Boozer, brawler, blasphemer, bully. 'Lover of liberty and property.' Bold, brave, hot headed, intemperate, philosopher, pamphleteer, commanding presence. Remarkably self-educated, a friend of scientific inquiry and calumniator of Puritan divines. Military hero, foolish adventurer, scourge of Tories, prisoner of war, author of the second most widely read work of the revolutionary era (after Paine’s Common Sense), “A Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen’s Captivity.” Successful and failed businessman, absentee father, enthusiastic land speculator. Duplicitous negotiator (with the British). Father of independent Vermont."
"Randall’s work gives ample coverage to all these features and more. It portrays Ethan not only as he saw himself — heroic — but as others saw him, ranging from George Washington to the Albany Junto [the landed Dutch gentry] to his British captors in England." More.
Randall visits Tuesday, December 6.
Ethan Allen Named a "Best Biography" in the WSJ
Carl Rollyson talks up Willard Sterne Randall's Ethan Allen in the Wall Street Journal "Gift Guide: Best of Biography" last month. Randall visits Tuesday, December 6.
"With every publishing season hailing another biography of some already well-documented Founder, it was a pleasure to descend into the trenches of American history with Willard Sterne Randall. His absorbing and comprehensive "Ethan Allen: His Life and Times" (Norton, 617 pages, $35) puts a good deal of flesh on the New England hero who captured the British-held Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775. A spirited man, Allen was, like many of his contemporaries, not averse to profiting from land speculation and accumulating family wealth in ways that allied him as much with the old world as the new. Allen was also notable for his unconventional guerrilla warfare and his searing accounts of his time as a British prisoner of war." WSJ
Monday, November 21, 2011
Thanksgiving Reading
Popular historian David O. Stewart, who visited the Writers Institute in 2007, and delivered the History Department's Fossieck Lecture, picked three books of American history for Thanksgiving reading on NPR's "All Things Considered" this evening: