Harriet Martineau: ‘Autobiography.’
Hawthorne’s analysis.
“A great humbug.”
Margaret Fuller was a person anxious to try all things, and fill up her experience in all directions; she had a strong and coarse nature which she had done her utmost to refine, with infinite pains; but of course it could only be superficially changed. The solution of the riddle lies in this direction, nor does one’s conscience revolt at the idea of thus solving it, for (at least, this is my own experience) Margaret has not left in the hearts and minds of those who knew her any deep witness of her integrity and purity. She was a great humbug—of course, with much talent and much moral reality, or else she could never have been so great a humbug. But she had stuck herself full of borrowed qualities, which she chose to provide herself with, but which had no root in her.
There never was such a tragedy as her whole story. The sadder and sterner, because so much of the ridiculous was mixed up with it, and because she could bear any thing better than to be ridiculous. It was such an awful joke, that she should have resolved—in all sincerity, no doubt—to make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of the age. And to that end she set to work on her strong, heavy, unpliable, and, in many respects, defective and evil nature, and adorned it with a mosaic of admirable qualities, such as she chose to possess, putting in here a splendid talent and there a moral excellence, and polishing each separate piece, and the whole together, till it seemed to shine afar and dazzle all who saw it. She took credit to herself for having been her own Redeemer, if not her own Creator; and indeed she is far more a work of art than any of Mozier’s statues. But she was not working on an inanimate substance, like marble or clay; there was something within her that she could not possibly come at, to re-create or refine it; and by and by this rude old potency bestirred itself, and undid all her labor in the twinkling of an eye. On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better for it; because she proved herself a very woman after all.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Extract from Roman Journal, in ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,’ a Biography, by Julian Hawthorne. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1885.
“A strange tragedy.”
Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a Sibyl. Such a pre-determination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her “mountain me” indeed: but her courage, too, is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense, à toute épreuve.