Material Dignity: Margaret Fuller's Reform Journalism

Michael Monescalchi Rutgers University "Material Dignity: Margaret Fuller's Reform Journalism" In focusing on Margaret Fuller’s New York Daily Tribune columns that detail the conditions of New York’s prisons and insane... [ view full abstract ]

Michael Monescalchi

Rutgers University

"Material Dignity: Margaret Fuller's Reform Journalism"

In focusing on Margaret Fuller’s New York Daily Tribune columns that detail the conditions of New York’s prisons and insane asylums, I argue that Fuller articulates an original philosophy of human dignity that is concerned not with the integrity of human interiority but with the complex relationship between one’s mental and physical health and one’s environment. Rather than conceive of human dignity in metaphysical or spiritual terms, as fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson does, Fuller radically posits that dignity is a recognizably material quality that forms in a person according to the conditions of that person’s environment. For instance, when she visits Bellevue’s insane asylum, Fuller says that the reason that “insanity appeared in…despairing forms” is because Bellevue’s main “building is [only partly] completed” and there is “no habitual expectation of light.” By theorizing insanity as an interior quality that is capable of taking on an exterior and material form and intermingling with one’s environment, Fuller argues that human dignity is determined by what lies outside the human: that an environment’s unhealthy attributes can migrate into and become part of one’s personhood, thus impacting the stability of one’s mental and physical health and thus one’s dignity. Fuller’s philosophy of human dignity, therefore, does not dwell on idealized discussions of the human condition; it is instead guided by the belief that all things material, including the body and the environment, have meaning.