Finding Margaret Fuller: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Bodies of Water

The novel is replete with images of bodies of water. They symbolize movement and relate to the theme of The Struggle for Independence. Not surprisingly, Margaret is plagued by a recurring nightmare in which she finds herself drowning. While this terrifying experience presages the way she dies, it also symbolizes her struggle to surface her intellectual and ideological aspirations in a world that discourages women from pursuing such aspirations. Despite her aversion to water in her dreams, Margaret actively seeks locales that include a water feature. She walks by the river in Concord with Waldo and has many meaningful conversations with him there. She goes boating with Hawthorne on the same river. She watches the sun rise over Walden Pond and visits it many times in the company of Thoreau and Waldo. In each of these instances, her communication with the Transcendentalists helps her assert her independence in a world determined to stamp it out.

Early in her overseas junket, she visits poet William Wordsworth at his home in the English Lake District. Once she arrives in Rome, she spends many hours strolling beside the Tiber River in Giovanni’s company. Margaret’s failed struggle for freedom is mirrored in Rome’s capitulation to an invading French army. In escaping with her family from Italy, she takes to the water once again, but the waves of the Atlantic, only 100 yards from shore, end her struggle for freedom.

Gardens

Just as Finding Margaret Fuller is filled with water imagery, it contains several gardens. These spaces symbolize beauty and comfort while also inversely relating to the theme of Defying Convention. Initially, Margaret gravitates to Emerson’s gardens in Concord. The transcendental belief in the divinity of nature dictates that all the denizens of Concord spend much of their time among plants and flowers. However, Margaret’s idyllic sojourn in this latter-day paradise has its downside. Much like the lotus-eaters in Homer’s The Odyssey, Margaret is tempted to forget her ambitions and wile away her time in the country. She eventually realizes the folly of remaining in this rarefied atmosphere, orbiting luminaries like Emerson or Hawthorne, when neither man can offer her more than platonic friendship. She says, “I need something more. Something else to pour myself into—my passion, my mind, my energy. And now I understand that I must leave Concord in order to find it” (148). Before her move to New York, she journeys through the wilderness of the Great Lakes region. In these travels, she experiences nature largely untamed, in a far more natural state than a garden, which symbolizes her spirit and aligns with her feeling that society has repressed her true nature as something it can control.

She experiences a similar awakening while visiting Wordsworth in his garden. As she speaks excitedly about the Italian fight for freedom, her host advises her to withdraw from such worldly concerns and remain in the soothing embrace of nature. This is much the same argument that conventional men might make in wooing women to a conventional life as wives and mothers. Margaret’s reaction in this second Garden of Eden is similar to her earlier reaction to the gardens of Concord: “I have had enough of walking and talking my way through gardens. I am eager to throw myself into the melee. Because I believe that my words have a power that I cannot waste” (252).

Butterflies

When Margaret is on the verge of leaving for Europe, Waldo gifts her a set of butterfly hair combs. The butterfly is generally perceived as a symbol of transformation or metamorphosis, but in the novel, it functions instead to convey Margaret’s restless lifestyle as she flits from one place to another and speaks to the theme of Searching for Home. Even though she treasures her retreats to Concord, Margaret knows that she can’t stay there permanently. The need to work and earn a living drives her to seek new financial opportunities. She tells Waldo, “I feel as though I’m to be a wandering pilgrim all my life” (69).

Seeking work is only part of the reason for her wandering lifestyle. Margaret remains a butterfly and only settles briefly because she doesn’t feel there’s any one place where she belongs. The men of the transcendentalist circle find mates and establish homes of their own. Both Boston and New York fail to contain the restless butterfly. Only when Margaret reaches Rome does she feel herself surrounded by kindred spirits. Sadly, their quest for freedom is just as doomed as her own. The ultimate irony is that Margaret must flee the place where she feels most at home because freedom is still an ideal and not a reality. The novel ends with one final allusion to a butterfly as Margaret says, “What a life this butterfly has made. A life of stories. Stories of travel, of transformation, of sowing and growing. I know that, in a most meaningful way, I have already arrived” (378).