Radical Innocence: Margaret Fuller’s Utopian Rome

Abstract

Transcendentalist New England was animated by utopian dreams throughout the 1840s, but even as she occupied its intellectual center, Margaret Fuller stood apart from these enthusiastic projections. Instead, she expressed skepticism of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, predicting empty rhetoric and certain failure. As she moved onward to New York and then to Europe, Fuller’s thinking and writing became more and more utopian, fired by the revolutionary impulses at work in France and Italy in the years leading up to 1848. Ancient Rome, once a source of rigid discipline in Fuller’s childhood, became a place of Romantic possibility as she advocated for the cause of the Roman Republic. Unexpectedly aligning herself with Henry David Thoreau’s efforts to give utopianism new roots in his bean field at Walden Pond, Fuller embraced the radicalism of her own transatlantic experiment, hoping for a wider world of innocence born from Transcendental experience.

Keywords

• Romanticism
• Margaret Fuller
• utopianism
• Transcendentalism
• Ancient Rome
• Roman Revolution