The Romance of Old New England RooftreesCrawford, Mary Caroline
History
The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees
Crawford, Mary Caroline
Historic buildings -- New England; New England -- Biography
The unlovely side of Margaret Fuller must have made a very deep
impression upon Hawthorne. Gentle as the great romancer undoubtedly was
by birth and training, he has certainly been very harsh in writing, both
in his note-book and in his story of Brook Farm, of the woman we
recognise in Zenobia. One of the most interesting literary wars ever
carried on in this vicinity, indeed, was that which was waged here some
fifteen years ago concerning Julian Hawthorne's revelations of his
father's private opinion of the Marchesa d'Ossoli. The remarks in
question occurred in the great Hawthorne's "Roman Journal," and were
certainly sufficiently scathing to call for such warm defence as
Margaret's surviving friends hastened to offer. Hawthorne said among
other things:
"Margaret Fuller had a strong and coarse nature which she had done her
utmost to refine, with infinite pains; but, of course, it could be only
superficially changed.... 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 moral reality, or
else she could never have been so great a humbug.... Toward the last
there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally
and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was,
after all, kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their child
on board that fated ship.... On the whole, I do not know but I like her
the better, though, because she proved herself a very woman after all,
and fell as the meanest of her sisters might."
The latter sentences refer to Margaret's marriage to Ossoli, a man some
ten years the junior of his gifted wife, and by no means her
intellectual equal. That the marriage was a strange one even Margaret's
most ardent friends admit, but it was none the less exceedingly human
and very natural, as Hawthorne implies, for a woman of thirty-seven,
whose interests had long been of the strictly intellectual kind, to
yield herself at last to the impulses of an affectionate nature.
But we are getting very much ahead of our story, which should begin, of
course, far back in May, 1810, when there was born, at the corner of
Eaton and Cherry Streets, in Cambridgeport, a tiny daughter to Timothy
Fuller and his wife. The dwelling in which Margaret first saw the light
still stands, and is easily recognised by the three elms in front,
planted by the proud father to celebrate the advent of his first child.
The garden in which Margaret and her mother delighted has long since
vanished; but the house still retains a certain dignity, though now
divided into three separate tenements, numbered respectively 69, 72, and
75 Cherry Street, and occupied by a rather migratory class of tenants.
The pillared doorway and the carved wreaths above it still give an
old-fashioned grace to the somewhat dilapidated house.
[Illustration: FULLER HOUSE, CAMBRIDGEPORT, MASS.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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