This year the Margaret Fuller Society (MFS) is spending time getting to know its leaders and members who live all over the world. This month we honor the work of MFS Board Member and Racial Justice Committee Member Dr. Etta Madden, who is Professor of English, Emerita, at Missouri State University.
Q: What might MFS members ask you about?
A: Fuller Society members might ask me about 19th-century US women in Italy; US “utopian” and intentional communities and literature; cookbooks and foodways; knitting; and swimming.
Q: What’s something about Fuller that you find inspiring?
A: I fell in love with Fuller because of her writing about gender fluidity in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. However, as I read more of her writing and about her life, I came to admire the arc of her development—i.e. what she would call “the unfolding of her life from within”—but what we all know also was influenced by external forces, such as relationships with family and friends. I have been especially moved by how she was changed by her teaching experiences and her editorial experiences in New England; her time as a news writer in New York; and her dramatic personal changes as she traveled abroad in Europe.
It’s probably not surprising, then, that among my favorites of Fuller’s writings are her comments on “the American in Europe,” from one of her undated dispatches to the Tribune. Her delineation of three types of Americans—”the servile,” “the conceited,” and “the thinking American”—still ring true today as we consider why and how many people from the US travel. The first goes “abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes;” the second “declares he thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows it;” and the third “wishes to gather and carry back with him all that will bear a new culture and a new climate.” Fuller’s experiences in Rome’s Church of San Luigi (dei Francesi) with the San Domenichino frescoes of Santa Cecilia’s life—so understated in her dispatch of December 30, 1847—embody the “thinking American.” She is changed by what she learns of the noblewoman, Santa Cecilia, who cared deeply for the needy masses. These frescoes, rather than the famous Caravaggio paintings of biblical scenes, move her.
Q: What would you like to see the MFS accomplish in the next five years?
I am delighted to have come on board during the discussions of a “journaling for justice” conference. I’m hopeful that the planning for a conference celebrating women in international journalism will come to fruition in 2026—possibly in Italy!
Q: What is one thing you’ve learned or accomplished in the last year?
I organized and co-led a small group trip to Italy, following in the footsteps of nineteenth-century writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. It was such a treat leading a phenomenal group of “Woolites” with biographer Anne Boyd Rioux. I especially liked that it allowed me tap into my knowledge of US women writers in Italy (including Fuller, of course) as well as Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Etta Madden is Professor of English, Emerita, at Missouri State University. She will be a visiting professor at the University of Pisa, Italy, Fall 2024, and has been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the Università degli Studi di Catania (Italy), and a recipient of research fellowships at the New York Public Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her books include Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks (SUNY Press 2022), Eating in Eden: Food & American Utopias (U Nebraska 2006) and Bodies of Life: Shaker Literature and Literacies (Greenwood 1998).
Below is a brief bibliography of possible interest to MFS members to get to know Dr. Madden’s writing and research:
Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks. SUNY Press (April 2022 cloth; October 2022 e-book and paper).
Selections from Eliza Leslie. Ed., Intro. & Bibliography. University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
“Soaring Above Zoar: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Utopian Visions & Discourses.” In Eds. Kathleen Diffley, Caroline Gebhard and Cheryl Torsney. Secret Histories: A New Era of Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship. University of Georgia Press, Forthcoming 2024.
“Cultivation and Sustainability with Student Collaborators: Anne Hampton Brewster’s Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Letters from Rome, 1869-1870.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 40.1-2 (2023). 223-32. With Alyssah Morrison.
“Writing Man and Nature (1864) in Italy: George and Caroline Marsh on Human-Environmental Relations.” Rivista italiana di filosofia politica. 4 (2023), 197-214.
“Travels, Translations and Limitations: Ambasciatrice Caroline Crane Marsh.” Transatlantica: American Studies Journal. Special issue on Transatlantic Women Writers. 2018.1.
“Anne Hampton Brewster’s St. Martin’s Summer and Utopian Literary Discourses.” Utopian Studies 28.2 (2017), 305-26.
“Science in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827).” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 20 (2003) 1 & 2: 22-37. Co-authored with Shelley R. Block.
