Host This is yoUUr life Margaret Fuller:

Scene:

Five chairs on stage. A woman is sitting in one chair reading.

Enter: Narrator: Hello. Mind if I join you.

Woman: No, of course not.

[Narrator sits next to woman.]

Narrator:What’s that you’re reading?

Woman: Oh, just an old copy of The Dial.

Narrator:The Dial? Isn’t that the transcendentalist journal that was published back in the 1840s?

Woman: Yes, it is. I enjoy re-reading some of the articles and poems.

Narrator: Ah, yes. You were the first editor of The Dial.

Woman: That’s right--I was. How did you know?

Narrator: Well, you are Margaret Fuller, are you not?

Woman: You know my name, too??

Narrator: Of course! [stands up]  This is yoUUr life Margaret Fuller!!

[“Woman” Margaret Fuller gasps and covers her face with her hands while everyone claps and cheers.]

Narrator: Margaret Fuller, you are considered America's first true feminist. You held a distinctive place in the cultural life of the 1840’s American Renaissance. You were born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810 to Unitarian parents. Your father, Timothy Fuller, Jr. was a lawyer and politician who served four terms in Congress. Can you tell us a little bit about your home life?

Margaret Fuller:  Well, my father had hoped for a son but had me.
He personally educated me and continuously challenged my intellect. I was given tasks as many and as varied as the hours would allow and on subjects beyond my age. Each evening I had to recite to my father. As a result I received an intellectually rigorous classical education and was eventually admitted to the male-only halls of Harvard's Library. There I continued reading, research, and the study of languages—I am especially fond of French and German Romantic literature. I am also a scholar of German, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin.

[Speaking from behind a barrier]

Ralph Waldo Emerson: I invited you, Margaret, to Concord for three weeks in the summer of 1836 and was struck by your extreme plainness, your trick of opening and shutting your eyelids and your nasal voice. I was quite convinced that you would never go far. However, I soon recognized that you immediately learned all that we knew and had us at your mercy when you pleased to make us laugh.

I was born in 1803, in Boston, and received a classical education at Boston Latin School and at Harvard College. I followed in my father’s footsteps and was ordained a Unitarian minister in 1829. I found that I did not have the temperament to be a minister and quit the ministry in 1832. I then traveled to England where I began to formulate my Transcendental faith.

I returned to America in 1834 and began a new career as a lecturer and moved to Concord in 1835. There I gathered around me a circle of poets, reformers, artists, and thinkers among them, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Peabody sisters, the Alcott family, Jonas Very, the Ripleys and the Channings. When you came to Concord, I introduced you to all of them. You once said:

 “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”

Frankly, my dear, I was one of the exceptions!  But I did grow to admire your intellect and invited you to join me in editing the Transendentalist journal The Dial.

Narrator: Do you recognize that voice, Margaret?

Margaret Fuller: (excitedly) Of course I do! That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. Don’t tell me he’s here!?

Narrator: Here he comes now.

[Emerson walks up to Margaret, says “Surprise!” They hug each other, and he sits down next to her.]

Narrator: You were also a teacher, Margaret. One of the people you met in Concord was Bronson Alcott. He invited you to teach at his innovative Temple School in Boston.

Elizabeth Peabody: Hello, Margaret. In 1834 I helped Bronson Alcott establish Temple school in Boston where I taught Latin, math and geography. I came to disagree with Bronson Alcott's ways of teaching, so I quit in 1836. This gave an opportunity for you, Margaret, to replace me as teacher at Temple School.

            I was born in 1804 in Billerica, Massachusetts. I have been a devoted life-long Unitarian. While some of my transcendentalist friends felt that the only good in Unitarianism was that it led to Transcendentalism, I believe that Unitarianism is "terra firma" the bedrock of my religion. While my mother accepted the essential wickedness of the world, I believed that if the world was wicked it should be my lifelong duty to set it right.

            In 1839 I established a bookstore in Boston. This bookstore soon became the meeting place of the Transcendentalists in Boston. In my bookstore, for five years from 1839 to 1844, you conducted a women-only series of seminars that you called Conversations. These were very popular and attracted not only the wives of prominent citizens, but also other sympathetic social reformers. At Conversations learned women were free to explore ideas and speak their own thoughts on education, ethics, fine arts and women. That women could have their own opinions on matters outside their "sphere" proved an intoxicating proposition. One of the lasting results of these Conversations was the publication of your feminist book, WOMEN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

            By the way, thank you for being kind enough to allow me to publish some of my writings in The Dial while you were editor.

Margaret Fuller: That’s my wonderful old friend Elizabeth Peabody! Is she here, too?

[Elizabeth Peabody walks up to Margaret Fuller. They hug each other, and then Elizabeth sits down on the other side of Margaret from Emerson.]

[Speaking from behind the barrier]

Louisa May Alcott: Margaret, you were an inspiration to me. I first published my stories under a pseudonym—a man’s name. But you made me realize that women can succeed on their own. I was born in Germantown Pennsylvania in 1832. My formal education came mainly from my father, Bronson Alcott, who was an educational innovator. He hired you Margaret. You were one of my teachers and a friend of the family. My father was brilliant, but he was not a financial wizard. We were always poor. I have a gift for story telling. Mr. Emerson said that I am a natural source of stories... that I am the poet of children who knows their angels. In order to bring money into the family I began to write stories at an early age. I am most known for my classic novel LITTLE WOMEN based on my family and my life which was published in 1868. Up to that time there had been very few stories written about girls and young women. Even into the 21^st Century Little Women is a best seller.

Margaret Fuller: Louisa May Alcott, where are you? Come out here and give me a hug!

[Louisa May Alcott walks up to Margaret Fuller. They hug each other, and then Louisa sits down next to Elizabeth Peabody.]

Narrator: Your work as a journalist, Margaret, was for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, founded in 1841. Greeley took a strong moral tone in his newspaper. His main concern was the abolition of slavery and the introduction of universal suffrage. In 1846 the Tribune sent you to Europe as a foreign correspondent, an unheard of role for a young woman. In Rome you became an admirer of the policies of Giuseppe Mazzini, who devoted his life to the ideal of the unification of Italy as a republic, and you ardently supported the republicans and their short-lived Roman Republic in the Papal States. However, the Italian Revolution ended with the Siege of Rome in July 1849, when French forces restored the Pope to power.

Margaret Fuller:  Excuse me. May I add that this involvement was not merely political as I also fell in love with one of Mazzini's lieutenants Giovanni Angelo, the Marchese Ossoli. Our son, Angelo Eugene, was born in 1848. In 1850 I decided to return to America with my family, where I hoped to find a publisher for my book on the History of the Italian Revolution of 1848-1849.

[Speaking from behind the barrier]

Henry David Thoreau: Margaret, I searched and searched for the manuscript of your book on the Italian Revolution, but could not find it.

Margaret Fuller: Now, who is that??

Henry David Thoreau: I was born in Concord in 1817 and consider myself a poet, philosopher, naturalist, essayist and educator. After graduating from Harvard in 1837 I returned to Concord in search of an occupation. In Concord I was befriended by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I gave my first lecture before the Concord Lyceum. Margaret, Thank you, for publishing some of my poetry and essays in The Dial while you were editor. Their publication gave me recognition as an original intellect.

Mr. Emerson was extremely grieved to hear that on the way to New York your ship was wrecked in a hurricane at Fire Island just off the U.S. coast on July 19, 1850. You and your family all perished in that shipwreck. Since I was quite capable, Mr. Emerson sent me to Fire Island to search the wreckage for your personal effects. He was particularly interested in finding the draft of your book on the history of the failed Italian Revolution. Sad to say, I found nothing.

Narrator: Henry David Thoreau, please come and join with Margaret Fuller’s friends here.

[Thoreau comes out and hugs Margaret, then sits down next to Emerson.]

Narrator: Margaret Fuller you are considered to be one of the three most important Transcendentalists along with Emerson and Thoreau. American Transcendentalism was a major revolution in literature, philosophy and art that occurred during the 1830’s and 40’s. It was a revolt mainly of Unitarian ministers against Unitarian rationalism. The transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each individual find "an original relation to the universe". Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. You sought it as literary critic, editor, journalist, teacher, and political activist, and ultimately, a revolutionary.

We at UUFSB are grateful to you and all of the Transcendentalists for a rich heritage of free spiritual living.