An American Jeremiah in Rome: A Study of Margaret Fuller's ... - aisna

116 RSA Journal 11
nationalist ideology: the former by inviting America to regain its
position of republican paragon, and the latter by implying that
America's preeminence was never challenged by the Italians'
performance in the first place.
Aestheticizing the Revolution
Despite its accuracy, the dichotomy I have delineated above
between a sympathetic public history of the Roman republic and a
more critical private one would be reductive and oversimplifying
without the additional exploration of how Fuller's public dispatches
are themselves a conflicted, contradictory text, often characterized
by less-than-celebratory approaches to Italian liberalism. Specifically,
the Tribune articles repeatedly present the Italian revolutions not as
historical events fraught with political significance, but as spectacles
enacted for the entertainment of the American observer and her
transatlantic readers. This aestheticization of Italian republicanism is
often accompanied by a seemingly antithetical lament over Italy's
loss of aesthetic value in the process of political modernization.
Whether the revolution in Rome is seen as a charming pageant or,
on the contrary, as a threat to the touristic pleasures offered by
papal Rome, however, both views imply Fuller's failure to put
Italian republicanism on a par with American democracy.
Upon her arrival in Rome in the spring of 1847, Fuller wrote
to her socialist friend William Henry Channing that "art is not
important to me now." Instead, she continued, "I take interest in
the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them.
I see the future dawning; it is in important aspects Fourier's
future". 41 It was an unconventional declaration, since in the
American imagination Italy had traditionally embodied artistic
rather than political achievements, and represented temporal
stagnation rather than historical evolution. 42 Fuller did write about
Italy's revolutions instead of its monuments at a time when other
major New England intellectuals like Emerson and Hawthorne
largely ignored them. Still, her representation of the people in the
act of making history often reduces them once more to apolitical