Margaret Fuller: A Psychological Biography
by . New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe. 1920. 12mo, viii + 213 pp. Portrait. $2.00.
THERE is an advantage in applying the methods of modern psychological analysis to a woman long since dead. Unlike the living ‘subject,’ she does not change during the process, nor can she protest the verdict of the analyst. But it is a curious freak of the times that Margaret Fuller should ‘end her strange, eventful history’ by falling into the hands of a skillful Freudian disciple, who, by applying the Freudian principles to Miss Fuller’s career, conclusively proves her to have been almost everything which she would herself have found most hateful in the woman of her day.
Miss Anthony acknowledges herself a warm advocate of her heroine. She praises her Feminism. She sympathizes with her struggles in the world of letters and in that of the affections. She condones her severities with others and her laxities with herself where conduct is concerned. But she leaves us with not one illusion in regard to Miss Fuller — either her virtues or her charms.
Margaret Fuller passed a neurotic childhood, ‘her soul uncouth with hunger like a voracious binding in a nest, all wide-open beak and nothing else.’ Her relation with her father was early poisoned by ‘uncanny eroticism,’ which she herself is said to have recognized as ‘a psycho-sexual conflict.’ Mrs. Fuller, the mother of nine children in sixteen years, was a perfect example of an unselfish mother; but the daughter took little or no share in the care of ‘the little Fullers,’ as she called them. The Freudian theory of hysteria is said by Miss Anthony to be ‘a perfect fit’ as a description of her illnesses and glooms. So her various love-affairs with older women, her boundless ambitions, the short hours of sleep necessary for her, and the combination of extraordinary energy and domestic languor, all correspond to the Freudian scheme of character-development.
Miss Anthony has a happy skill in the selecting of illustrations of Margaret Fuller’s writing. Each specimen shows eloquence and charm. Her pen was far more winning than her tongue.
The story of the mysteries and the violent delights of her years in Italy is here better told than in any of the other records of her Italian experience. The way in which her personal drama took shape and color from the political revolution is brilliantly set forth. The tragedy of the closing scene, when the strong woman literally went to her death without a struggle, is not inconsistent in the light of Miss Anthony’s unsparing analysis.
The book is one of the few readable products of the dark, Freudian system; and even if one refuses to go to the extreme of that fantastic theory,one must acknowledge that Miss Anthony by its help has solved some perplexing problems in the character and career of Margaret Fuller.
H. E. H.