Category: Event Recap

This post was written by Contributing Author and MFS Past President Phyllis Cole.

The Margaret Fuller Society contributed a panel with the title “Where in the World is Margaret Fuller?” to the Annual Gathering of the Henry David Thoreau Society in Concord, Massachusetts on Thursday, July 7, 2022. For several years we have been broadening the Annual Gathering’s previously exclusive focus on Thoreau by offering, along with the Emerson and Alcott Societies, an array of presentations on Transcendentalist and Concord-based authors. Always we have contributed to the Thoreauvian theme of the year, which this year was “Globalism.” What better perspective than this on Fuller, whose reading, life travels, and influence were always international? We might truly ask “where in the world” we want to locate her.

It has been my pleasure as a member of the Thoreau Society Board of Directors to plan this dimension of the Gathering program and to moderate the 2022 Fuller panel. I was particularly delighted that the papers proposed found such different angles on the broad topic. We had Fuller reading female-inflected German Romanticism in one paper, negotiating the difficulties of trans-Atlantic letter-writing in a second, sustaining friendship with an Italian noblewoman of opposing political belief in a third, and finally making her belated appearance in today’s China. At the same time some common themes emerged in these papers: epistolary expression, friendship between women, translation as vital work from Fuller’s day to our own. The members of our panel themselves range in background across national boundaries. You can read their full paper abstracts and bios here.

Alice de Galzain, doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, began the session with her paper “Woman [and] Artist”: Margaret Fuller on Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Friendship.”  Fuller taught herself German, then used it to read Bettine’s epistolary novel, translate the text into English, and interpret its meaning to Dial readers. De Galzain claims these cross-lingual acts as “feminist agency,” especially as they contribute to Fuller’s celebration of gender-defining women’s friendship, proceeding from within the soul and extending outward.

Cheryl Weaver, doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, approached epistolary expression in terms of problematic conveyance as well as content, in “I found your note here several days since”: Margaret Fuller and Postal Delivery from Europe. Fuller’s 1846 voyage to Europe came in the midst of American developments of both the postage stamp and the penny post, so that access to letter exchange boomed. But mail across the Atlantic was both more expensive and more problematic, as Fuller reveals in her private letters over the two years following.

Letters and their reports of conversation serve as evidence in Mario Bannoni’s paper, The Opposing Political Passions and Common Womanly Positions of Margaret Fuller and Costanza Arconati Visconti on the Eve of the Italian Risorgimento. Communication between Fuller and Arconati was a linguistic challenge: at first neither spoke the other’s language with confidence, so that they wrote to each other in French. And this was only the beginning of their difference, which also encompassed social status, religion, and position on the needed transformation of Italy. Nonetheless the two mutually defined a friendship ascending from inward soul to womanly bonding.

Close correspondence and friendship between Fuller and China never took place, but Julia Xianju Du explores cultural contact then and now in Margaret Fuller in China. Despite the Chinatown growing up in Boston (not far from the Peabody Bookstore), her contact with Chinese culture was limited to reading and quoting of Confucius. Even this, however, shows the power of translation as a trans-global resource of her time. In twenty-first century China there is growing interest in Fuller’s place among American Transcendentalists and advocates of women’s rights, with master’s theses about her on the rise. But translation of her actual writings is work still needed.

Read the full abstracts for the presentations here.

A Message from MFS Past President Phyllis Cole:

It’s a great pleasure to let Fuller Society members know that on July 9 we presented our triennial Award for Social Service to pioneering journalist and educator Christina Asquith.  The setting was our society dinner party at the American Literature Association meeting, with thirteen of us, including Christina and her ten-year-old daughter Marianna, gathered around a conversational table at Piattini in Boston’s Back Bay. 

The Social Service Award recognizes ”extraordinary achievement in extending the social ideals advanced by Margaret Fuller,” and the award committee realized immediately that this year’s honoree had to be Christina Asquith.  You may remember that in 2018 Megan Marshall offered an interview with Christina in Conversations, which you could access here.  But now we have caught up with her more recent career as well.   

Through the interview we heard about Christina’s amazing work in establishing the Fuller Project for International Reporting, designed to support the investigation of women’s issues around the world.  Christina had personally experienced the difficulty of getting such issues recognized by major press outlets as a freelance reporter in Baghdad and Istanbul in the years after 2003.  A decade later, reading Megan Marshall’s biography of Fuller as she organized this collaborative project was like ”gasoline poured on a simmering fire,” she said, and as a result the project honored Fuller in its official name.    Christina Asquith served as editor-in-chief of the Fuller Project from 2014 to 2020, during which time the organization raised $5 million for its work—with more in the pipeline—and grew incrementally in scale and visibility.  Some of their early stories concerned a Syrian girl who lost her violin and music career in the war, a tragically large number of Russian women murdered through domestic violence, and a Turkish woman with an MBA inheriting her father’s confectionary business.  But Christina also landed a cover story in Time magazine (9-2-2019) about women living less far away, in the “Left Behind Economy” of waitress work for minimum wages in this country.  By 2020 the Fuller Project had become an established part of the international press, and you can see its range of current publications here.   

At this point, however, Christina was ready for a new initiative.  The burgeoning of the Fuller Project, she felt, owed a lot not just to its unfolding in times of #MeToo, Mideast war, and Hillary’s well-publicized campaign.  In addition, a new generation of women around the world was getting educated to use Twitter and the internet and do their own coding.  And so she took on direction of the new Hack Club, an educational initiative to accelerate such literacy, through an alliance of school-based clubs around the world with the most advanced women in tech spaces, from bitcoin to artificial intelligence and space technology.  “I wanted to be part of something radical,” she wrote to me about this in one email.  We live in an internet-driven world; collectively we create a new kind of journalism, with many people rising with skill to tell their own stories. And yes, she assured me, this social justice campaign was equally in the spirit of Margaret Fuller.  Our committee agreed right away!   “Learning to code,” declares the club’s website, “is uniquely like gaining a superpower—turning you from a consumer of technology into a creator.”  

And so the Social Service award recognizes Christina Asquith as both a journalist and an educator.  At the dinner in Boston she was given a carved wooden plaque, as well as a modest donation to the Hack Club and lifetime membership in the Margaret Fuller Society.  To Marianna we gave a book sack with the motto “Let them be sea captains,” courtesy of the website for Peter Reilly’s Fuller documentary.  Christina warmly embraces her membership and hopes to stay in touch as we move forward toward an international conference on “Journaling for Justice.”   

Three years ago the Social Service award was given to me (indeed given my name), recognizing work simply to further the society’s connection with the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House in Cambridge.  As I hope you know, this was her birth home, not far from Central Square; but since the early twentieth century it has also been a service center for the working, often immigrant and economically struggling, people in its area. I’ve been happy to increase the contact between this place and Fuller’s legacy, including her own calls for justice to the poor. But this year, heading the search for the next recipient of the “Phyllis Cole Award for Social Service,” I have welcomed the opportunity to flip the picture and recognize communications about women around the world. Both are authentic Fuller. Writing to the Tribune from Rome in 1848, she described violence against women in the very midst of revolution as a subject she would take up again “if I live.” Instead, she had to rely on the efforts of others, among whom we’re happy to recognize Christina Asquith and her expanding network. 

Please join me in welcoming Christina to the Margaret Fuller Society. 

Phyllis 

Past President, Margaret Fuller Society 

This post was written by Contributing Author Jenessa Kenway, a doctoral student at University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her dissertation work explores links between pastoral and botanical imagery and the expression of feminine consciousness.

I was deeply inspired by a 2018 conference organized by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). The conference showcased a dazzling array of feminine scholarship and women authors of every rank and file and it was my first time presenting a paper at a conference. SSAWW scholars introduced me to a new realm of the academic world and the interconnected nature of that world. I left with a hurricane of ideas, and two lasting things: friends in the Margaret Fuller Society and the idea for an art exhibit.

I was already interested in Fuller and the visual arts. The essay I presented, “The Visual Genealogy of Margaret Fuller,” explored Fuller’s feminine aesthetics and potential interest in women artists. I owe many thanks to the supportive Fullerites on the panel and in the audience whose friendly presence and support helped calm my nerves.

The Seeds

After my panel, I attended loads of others, one of which­–a roundtable on Louisa May Alcott and the humanities­–stood out from the rest. The presenters all covered innovative strategies for teaching Alcott that were applicable to literature in general. Last to present was Mark Gallagher, who overviewed the exhibition he put together for the UCLA Library for the 150^th anniversary of Little Women. His exhibit displayed artifacts from Alcott’s life and showed Alcott’s continuing influence by featuring the work of women writers and leaders who were inspired by the rebellious protagonists of Little Women.

An art exhibit about literature: I was hooked. At the Friday night mixer, Gallagher generously shared with me more about his exhibit, and I began to plan my own.

My background is in visual art. In a former life, I pursued a career as a visual artist, that is until I discovered that I loved writing about art. I’ve come to realize that writing is as much an art form as the plastic arts. While they have their distinctive qualities, text and image share much in common and complement one another.

A literary art exhibit seemed to be the perfect way to merge my past with my present, the world of art with the world of literature. Soon Fuller’s visionary essay, “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” became the narrative inspiration for my own exhibit: A Beauteous Tree: Margaret Fuller’s “Femality,” which was open at the Marjorie Barrick Art Museum from May 28 to July 24, 2021. You can take an informal tour of the exhibit here (opens in new window).

I envisioned a hybrid exhibit: text and images nested within a space that is itself a work of art. In the exhibit, a thick green band, like a green scroll or long segments of chalkboard, circumnavigates the entire display space, elevating quotations to the level of paintings. Strategically placed magnolia leaf accents create viewing areas further uniting text and image pairings.

The Roots

The Magnolia tree of Fuller’s story explores the roots of feminine creativity through one of the oldest flowering trees on the planet. The use of a tree offers a means of expressing feminine identity while avoiding the gender indicators of the human body. The idea that feminine expression could occur without a female body, opens the story—and Fuller’s concept of “femality”–to a host of modern gender readings, of which she had never even dreamt, but nevertheless, renews the relevance of her work in our scholarly climate of diversity. This led me to organize the show around the magnolia story and Fuller’s concept of “femality.”

Like Gallagher’s exhibit, I was committed to showing how the literature of the past carries forward, impacting our lives today. I focused on tracking the appearance of Fuller’s concept of “femality” in other feminist texts and then paired these literary manifestations with works of visual art that enhanced the concept, providing a focal point for theory and story.

Thinking about how literature impacts us now makes me think about the different audiences of literature, from casual readers to university students to academic scholars. The format of an art exhibit was a good way to reach those different audiences and bring together different types of readers and find common interests. I think as scholars we don’t want to just be writing and making things for each other. It is important that the work of academia is accessible and has relevance and value to people outside of institutions.

The Fruits

In the wonderful zoom talk that she gave in conjunction with the exhibit, Dr. Christina Katopodis highlighted the benefits of biodiversity and the social and environmental dangers of allowing monocultures to dominate. People, plants, and insects thrive upon biodiversity that encourages, as Katopodis said, “diverse and vibrant” beings. At the 2018 SSAWW conference, within the Margaret Fuller Society, and in the organization of this exhibit, I experienced this vibrant diversity.

Activities during the zoom lecture demonstrated the diversity Katopodis talked about. She gave us three minutes and we each drew a magnolia flower that resulted in a host of floral interpretations that said as much about the one drawing as the flower they were thinking about. Later, we read passages from Fuller’s letters which included brief descriptions of plants such as amaranths, violets, and rose bushes. With each quote, we attempted to express the feelings and visuals of the plant imagery through the positioning of our hands and arms. In each exercise, we creatively expressed our observations. Watch the full lecture here (opens in new window).

For the exhibit, I held a drawing workshop on a Saturday afternoon, in which I talked about Fuller’s magnolia story, my own self-identification with the willow tree, and asked people to think about what they would look like as a tree. After a little hesitation, everyone began drawing. There was a tree with a fluffy bursting top; a long sinuous limbed tree of the savannah; a tree with ceremonial terracotta figures growing upon it, trees with hearts, lines of small trees representing children in front of big parental trees; trees blown by gusting winds.  Each tree was different, and everyone was able to find their own tree self.

The SSAWW conference is, of course, unrivaled feminine diversity. And the smaller circles of SSAWW also demonstrate diversity and interconnection. At a special luncheon, there were tables occupied with an assortment of nineteenth-century literature societies including Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, many of whom also have ties with the Emerson and Thoreau societies. While I’m not a member of all of these groups, I am connected through the cross-sharing of CFPs and the general spirit of cooperation. Talking to one another and allowing members to mingle, encourages rich conversation and an interconnected scholarly community.

My initial hazy goal of putting together an art exhibit inspired by Fuller taught me about myself and the kind of scholar I want to be and the positive effect of sharing ideas. The ideas and people I met through today’s vibrant network of scholarship grew into a beautiful art exhibit.

Jenessa Kenway is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of Nevada Las Vegas studying feminine aesthetics and interconnections between art and literature from the 19^th century to present. Her essay “Talking with a Magnolia Tree: Margaret Fuller and American Transcendentalism” was published in the 2019 Norton UNLV world literature essay collection, Sing Goddess. Her work tracking beauty and the sublime in Elizabeth Stoddard’s Two Men won the 2020 Brooks-Hudgins award and she was awarded the Dorothy Mae Freischel scholarship for excellence in interdisciplinary scholarship, projects, and classroom instruction methods. Her essay on visual and literary superrealism in the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard was published in 2019 in Penn State’s interdisciplinary journal Soundings. She writes on art and culture for KNPR’s Desert Companion and teaches courses in composition and world literature.Support for the exhibition came from the UNLV Jean Nidetch CARE Center, a Nevada Humanities Project Grant, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and the WESTAF Regional Arts Resilience Fund, a relief grant developed in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support arts organizations in the 13-state western region during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This post was co-authored by Charlene Avallone, Elizabeth Dean, and Christina Katopodis. Photos courtesy of Noelle Baker, and paper abstracts provided by Sonia Di Loreto.

On Thursday, May 23rd, Margaret Fuller Society (MFS) members gathered at the American Literature Association conference in Boston. MFS President Charlene Avallone and MFS Treasurer Noelle Baker delivered papers on the “Recovering the 19th-Century Women’s Rights Movement” panel moderated by Jen McDaneld. Avallone discussed “Laura C. Bullard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and George Sand in the Nineteenth-Century American Woman’s Movement,” and Baker presented “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Women’s Reproductive Rights.” A vibrant discussion followed focusing especially on women’s reproductive rights then and now. MFS Website Editor Christina Katopodis presented her fold/unfold pedagogical exercise in “Unfolding Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’” on the Hawthorne Society panel. Following the day’s panels, there was a welcome reception in Essex South and a roundtable on “The Old Corner Bookstore; or Why is the Most Important Literary Site in Boston a Fast-Food Court?”

For a more comprehensive list of MFS members who presented on panels and roundtables at ALA, see the list at the end of this post.

On Friday, Mollie Barnes of University of South Carolina Beaufort gave an engaging paper on the panel “Anonymity, Access, Absence: Challenges of Recovering Nineteenth-Century Literature,” titled “Transatlantic Recovery: How Margaret Fuller’s Lost History Teaches Us to Read,” which moved away from Fuller’s own texts to examine the development of Fuller’s mythos and legacy through periodical reports of her death.

The Saturday, May 25th session of the ALA conference featured well-attended back-to-back panels sponsored by the MFS. First Vice President Sonia Di Loreto chaired the first panel sponsored by the MFS, “Margaret Fuller’s Languages.” The papers focused primarily on Fuller’s prolific translation work and the ways these translations fit into her overarching intellectual projects. Board Member Fritz Fleishman presented on “Translating Fuller: The Play of Interpretation.” Brigitte Bailey of University of New Hampshire gave her paper, “Translating Urban Radicalism for the New-York Tribune: Fuller’s Readings of the Deutsche Schnell post,” which connected directly with the attention to Fuller’s interest in German language and philosophy as covered in the paper given by Christina Zwarg (Haverford College), “Glimpsing Goethe’s Corpse: Translating the Now in Fuller’s Eckermann. Chaired by Katie Kornacki, editor of “Conversations,” the panel he second panel also approached Fuller from a formal/generic angle, focusing particularly on her poetry, and was titled “Winged Sphinxes: Margaret Fuller’s Poetry and Poetics.”  The papers were “Fuller and the Flowering a Female God: Male Sacrifice and Female Transfiguration in ‘Raphael’s Deposition from the Cross’’” from Ariel Silver of Claremont Graduate University, “Portals of Transformation: Object Studies in Fuller’s 1844 Poems” by Joan Wry of Saint Michael’s College, “The Vanishing Indian in Margaret Fuller’s ‘Governor Everett Receiving the Indian Chiefs, 1837’” by Thomas Sorensen of University of Western Ontario, and “Fuller’s Hauntological Poetics” by Katie Simon of Georgia College. This panel was followed by a particularly lively conversation regarding the potential intersections of thing theory and Margaret Fuller’s poetry, particularly growing out of Silver’s and Wry’s papers. Read the full abstracts and panel CFPs here.

These two excellent panels were followed by the Margaret Fuller Society’s businesses meeting, for which full notes are available here.

On Sunday morning a dozen Fullerites–Society members and guests–ended the conference by sharing brunch at Brownstone’s, billed as “a star on Boston’s vibrant culinary scene.”  Thanks to the planning of VP1 Jana Argersinger, we enjoyed good conversation over eggs Benedict and granola. Talk of Fuller ranged over the past and future, as guests included Peter Wiley, whose ancestor John Wiley published (and censored) the author, and members discussed plans and dreams for the next international conference the Society will sponsor, to be co-ordinated by Mollie Barnes. 

Many society members participated in panels and roundtables at the conference, including: