“By birth a child of New England” and “By genius belonging to the World”: Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson

Abstract: This essay establishes original connections between Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller by situating Dickinson’s writings within the context of Fuller’s life, works, and U.S. reception. It uses print culture’s response to Fuller’s death at sea in July 1850 as a new interpretive lens for discussing Dickinson’s 1850s depictions of sea journeys as both liberating and perilous. It examines parallels between Fuller’s and Dickinson’s associations of Italy with quotidian and ineffable experiences and the feminine, and it highlights similarities between Fuller’s representation of revolutionary Italy in relation to U.S. culture and Dickinson’s use of Italian volcanoes to symbolize latent dangers beneath seemingly placid American landscapes.