Agitating Margaret Fuller

This chapter offers a competing portrait of Margaret Fuller’s brand of political citizenship. By examining Fuller’s earlier work, especially her writings about music, a new version of her political and social views becomes visible. The affective and formal elements of Fuller’s thought—where various sounds, tones, and pulsations explicitly and/or implicitly mediated her thinking about material reality—reveal a complex dialectic between the personal and the social. Going much further than merely revising the common historical narrative that sees Fuller moving from romantic to radical modes of thinking after her departure for Europe in 1846, the chapter portrays how Fuller develops a model of nineteenth-century political personhood that literary scholars and historians alike have yet to fully address.