Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the Politics of Reprinting, 1845–1980

Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the Politics of Reprinting, 1845–1980 Eagan Dean (bio) In 1850, writer Margaret Fuller drowned just off the New York coast, alongside her partner Giovanni Angelo Ossoli and their toddler son Angelino. She was only forty years old. Contemporary literati mourned Fuller elaborately, dedicating memorial volumes and commemorative statues in the years after her death and offering a putative memoir constructed by several of her male peers more as a proxy for their own careers than a memorial to hers.1 The mourning particularly focused on her missing manuscript work about the doomed Italian revolution (drowned in the same ocean) and her intense and still blossoming career’s sudden abbreviation. Arthur Fuller, her brother, responded to this outpouring in 1855 by republishing Margaret Fuller’s most influential work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) in a collection with selections from her periodical work, especially her New York Tribune writing.2 Arthur Fuller published further anthologies in later years, covering most of Margaret Fuller’s oeuvre. As interest in Margaret Fuller waned in the following decades, surviving American Renaissance writers and their successors began to dismiss her and her thought. By 1885, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian Hawthorne would [End Page 39] quip, “Margaret Fuller has at last taken her place with the numberless other dismal frauds who fill the limbo of human pretension and failure,” partly because he published his father’s private criticisms about Fuller’s relationship with Giovanni Ossoli.3 Thomas Mitchell argues that Julian “inflicted decanonizing damage” which affected Fuller’s intellectual legacy for the next century.4 Donna Dickenson and later scholars have carefully considered the “Margaret myth” which the posthumous, unauthorized, and heavily fabricated Memoirs constructed after her death.5 Following Bell Gale Chevigny and Joel Myerson’s turn to biographical evidence about Fuller’s life in the 1970s, many noted scholars contended with the contrasting accounts left by Fuller’s contemporaries to construct narratives about her life and intellectual impact.6 Jeffrey Steele best contextualizes Fuller’s “many faces”: reviewing three recent Fuller biographies in 2010, Steele compares their divergences to those of her three first biographers, “Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke [who] each depicted the woman who had been ‘his’ Margaret Fuller,” arguing that Fuller’s inherently “multi-faceted” personality creates such productive deviations.7 In 1976, Chevigny analyzed Fuller’s posthumous censorship, and in 1988, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser cataloged contemporary biographers’ recuperative and interventionist choices. Other scholars attend more to Fuller’s impact than to her person: Fuller is a cornerstone of Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism (2014), in which Phyllis Cole, Jana L. Argersinger, and their contributors resituate Fuller as an intellectual founder of Transcendentalism.8 Meanwhile, Cole and Sonia Di Loreto have both shown how literary proliferation around a fictive Fuller highlighted the aching archival absence precipitated by her death and the loss of her late work, an absence that haunted those who sought to memorialize her.9 The edited collection Margaret Fuller and her Circles (2013) [End Page 40] contextualizes Fuller within her New England intellectual network.10 Recently, Di Loreto tackled the immediate material and intellectual aftermath of Fuller’s death on her circle and their archives.11 Building on these foundations, this essay focuses on how Arthur Fuller’s edition of Margaret Fuller’s most famous work, titled Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition, and Duties of Woman (1855), changes her ideas’ contexts and meanings to influence her legacy. After reviewing Woman in the Nineteenth Century’s timeline as a work from article to book, I analyze the more significant changes made by the 1855 edition, examining the prefatory material, headings, pagination, footnotes and even attribution of the 1855 edition as examples of information produced by the often-invisibilized editing and publishing process but which create new contexts and altered use conditions for the book as a material object. The pagination shifts and related page header changes particularly recalibrate the stakes of Margaret Fuller’s thought concerning the historical norms that structured women’s antebellum activism. Taking a wider view, the latter sections consider the archival and scholarly consequences of...