Margaret Fuller's Archive: Absence, Erasure, and Critical Work

Abstract

All archival work is linked to questions of loss, death, and the afterlife of papers and objects. In the specific case of the Margaret Fuller archive, the generative force behind the gathering of materials, and the construction of a repository, reside in the void left by the ‘ghost manuscript’, her last work on the 1840s European revolutions that was never recovered or found. As a reflection on the origins of the archive, this article looks at the way different instantiations of the Fuller archive have been imagined, created, and fostered over the years. The first archival model is Henry David Thoreau’s inclusive assemblage of organic material, where objects and belongings try to find a new, impermanent life. Soon after her death, in the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Ralph Waldo Emerson applied a normative, public, and nationalistic model. What seems at present a viable, more accurate, and useful option for the Margaret Fuller archive is a more fluid idea of the archive as palimpsest, which returns some objects and papers to their cosmopolitan, organic, and productive life, and that can be realized through a digital humanities project.

Keywords

• manuscript
• Margaret Fuller
• archive