Content area
Full text
Thus, ruins on ruins and tombs on top of tombs! This history that is Rome where epochs are measured by debris over debris, this human scene which consists of lives consumed and forgotten, fills the heart with a profound melancholy.
-Germaine de Staël, Corinne; Or, Italy
... if you go with a ruin in your heart, or with a vacant site there, where once stood the airy fabric of happiness, now vanished-all the ponderous gloom of the Roman Past will pile itself upon that spot, and crush you down as with the heaped-up marble and granite, the earthmounds, and multitudinous bricks, of its material decay.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places. . . . She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered.
-Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Three decades ago Perry Miller first suggested that Henry James intended his readers to believe that Margaret Fuller was the mother of the "sterile aesthete" Gilbert Osmond and his flamboyant sister the Countess Gemini in The Portrait of a Lady (xxvi).1 John Carlos Rowe has suggested more recently that James alludes negatively to Margaret Fuller and the "New Woman" in his early tales, "The Last of the Valerii" and "Adina," and in the late biography, William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Rowe argues that "Henry James began his literary career by repeating, and in some cases extending, the anti-feminist views of his most important New England predecessors, notably Emerson, Henry James Sr., and Hawthorne" ("Hawthorne's" 107).2 Returning to Miller's original observation, I would like both to strengthen the case for Margaret Fuller as Gilbert Osmond's mother and to propose an alternative appraisal of James's critical stance towards Margaret Fuller gleaned from numerous of his works but most evident in Portrait. Instead of reading James's relationship to the "Margaretghost" (WWS 1: 127)...