Engaging Italy

American Women's Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks

Etta M. Madden

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438488448
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Engaging Italy charts the intertwined lives and writings of three American women in Italy in the 1860s and '70s—journalist Anne Hampton Brewster (1818–92), orphanage and industrial school founder Emily Bliss Gould (1825–75), and translator Caroline Crane Marsh (1816–1901). Brewster, Gould, and Marsh did not follow their callings abroad so much as they found them there. The political and religious unrest they encountered during Italian Unification put their utopian visions of expatriate life to the test. It also prompted these women to engage these changes and take up their pens both privately and publicly. Though little-known today, their diaries, letters, poetry, and news accounts help to rewrite the story of American women abroad inherited from figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Both feminist recovery project and collective biography, Engaging Italy contributes to the growing body of scholarship on transatlantic nineteenth-century women writers while focusing particular attention on the shared texts and ties linking Brewster, Gould, and Marsh. Etta M. Madden demonstrates the generative power of literary and social networks during moments of upheaval.

PART I

PORTRAITS OF DIVERSITY

Chapter 1

Backstories of Diversity

Accounts of Marsh, Gould, and Brewster and their diverse utopian visions and experiences in transnational networks begin neither with the dinners celebrating Longfellow in 1869 nor with the women’s first encounters with each other. The three had arrived on the peninsula at different moments, and they had experienced transnational travel long before. Brewster, the most recently arrived, had been in Rome since November of 1868.¹ Gould, who usually summered in the Alps, had arrived with her husband, James, in Italy seven years earlier, in 1861.² Marsh had come to Italy that same year, when her husband became the first US minister plenipotentiary to the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. Even prior to their experiences in Italy, highlights of their backstories—including time in Europe—illuminate the callings they followed abroad.

Caroline Crane Marsh: Literary Activist and Ambasciatrice

Marsh traveled abroad first in 1849 a few months after George was appointed American minister to the Ottoman Empire, but she had exhibited much earlier her love of learning, of books, and of travel. The three went together throughout her life. Travels, building on what she had read, widened her horizons. At twelve years Marsh went from rural Massachusetts to live with her brother Silas Crane in Providence, Rhode Island, where she began her formal education, and then at sixteen she traveled with him to Vermont, where he began a new position as minister and she began teaching in the school he had established. Next she traveled to New York to teach in Martha Mitchell’s school. Before she left for New York, she had met in 1838 the widowed attorney George, who expressed that he was stimulated “by her intellect and personal charm,” a reason to see her often. Their marriage soon followed, along with additional years in Burlington. By 1843 she was with him in Washington, where he was serving as a member of congress, alongside the well-known Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and John Adams. Although chronic illness affected her ability to stand, to walk, and to see, she continued to cultivate her love of books, languages, and translating with the help of family and friends, who often read to and wrote for her. While she was living in Washington, summer visits to Providence, Boston, and Burlington kept Marsh in close contact with additional family and friends. Letters among these and others capture her anticipations of and reflections on travel and life abroad.³

Marsh’s first travel through Europe, while en route to Turkey, occurred not only with her husband but also with her sister Lucy and members of George’s prior family—now her own: his son George Ozias and his sister-in-law’s daughter. While Marsh recorded impressions in letters sent to family and friends, she also included details of her physical condition as an “invalid,” providing a picture of the challenges for some traveling abroad. In Paris, for example, her husband carried her up and down stairs in the Louvre and rolled her in a wheelchair through the galleries. Marsh described the rigor of getting from Paris to Marseille: “a little bed was prepared for me and put into the carriage, and in this way I found I could travel in ease and comfort.”⁴ In Constantinople, her health was “certainly better than when they left America.” However, her physical condition did not improve greatly during the years in Turkey. She had been near death with fever in 1851, although a winter in Egypt had provided some relief.⁵

While Marsh had her own discomforts, they paled in comparison to the extreme poverty she saw on her first journey in Italy, en route to Turkey. Like many Americans, she was shocked and moved by what she witnessed, after passing through the Alps to Genoa and into Tuscany. As she wrote, “It would be vain to try to convey … the want and discomfort we witnessed during this journey. Whole towns might be seen without a pane of glass or chimney, and it was lamentable to see half naked and half starved inhabitants gathering as night drew on under the lightless roof, which seemed for them and their beasts a shelter.”⁶ Later the same month, she expressed despair, as her family traveled south of Rome toward Naples, “through an incredible amount of idleness, poverty and beggary.” She noted that they “often had twenty or thirty persons” chasing their carriage, “assuring us they were starving and entreating us for a copper.” Of Naples, known for its extremes of beauty and poverty, she continued, “These beggars are less numerous in the city, but still one cannot go out without being surrounded by them.”⁷ While Marsh did not make overt connections between the “beggars” she witnessed and American slaves (as Fuller had in her Tribune dispatches), she saw the problem of poverty as endemic to the system of government and the culture it cultivated. The theme would emerge full force after she arrived in Italy in 1861 and interacted with political leaders, nobility, house servants, and gardeners.

After she left Naples and sailed to Constantinople, Marsh’s reflections changed. She began to write and to study eastern and non-Christian cultures. Her insights to human needs and foibles would later factor into her deepening understandings of Roman Catholicism in Italy and Protestant Americans’ sometimes simplistic views of the problems. For example, while she took comfort in the circle of ambassadors surrounding her in Constantinople, writing that “the foreign Ministers and their families” were also likable, Marsh felt differences with them. Acknowledging that they were “very nice people,” she and her husband differed from them in their beliefs and interactions with the local culture. She became “much interested in St. Augustine,” reflecting a venture into theological traditions, and was “nibbling at Turkish, being moved thereto by a desire to talk with the Turkish women.” During the fall and winter of 1851, she also “became much interested in the political refugees gathered there.” These included the Hungarian statesman Louis Kossuth and, from what is now the northern region of Italy, the Princess Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso.⁸ She sought to understand the social controversies that led to political exile. Marsh’s reflections during this first year abroad capture an openness to the world around her, her attempts to engage with it, and her desires to do what she could to improve people’s conditions. These characteristics would continue during her later years in Italy.

In fact, Marsh’s interactions with political refugees may have contributed to her strong reactions to meeting expatriate English poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning at their home, Casa Guidi, in Florence in the winter of 1853 while visiting friend Hiram Powers there. Before the meeting, Marsh knew Elizabeth’s poetry, although she did not know Robert’s.⁹ The famous female poet likely influenced Marsh’s work as both writer and social activist. Elizabeth’s “The Cry of the Children,” affiliated with child labor reform, had been published a decade earlier in Blackwood’s Magazine, and Casa Guidi Windows, about the revolutionaries in Florence, appeared just two years before. The Marsh and Browning meeting stimulated later correspondence and invitations for further visits.¹⁰ The Marshes stopped in Italy again late in 1854, en route home after George’s term ended, before they sailed for the US.

Marsh passed the phase following this international political appointment primarily with her husband in Burlington, Boston, and New York, where George lectured on the English language. In response to their financial strains, she scrimped as much as possible on household expenses so that he might have his books. But likely this prioritizing of the literary was of personal interest to her as well. As Marsh’s early family biographer wrote of her challenging balance between familial duty and internal desires, “she had the rare combination of practical good sense and brilliant intellectual gifts”; “each moment that she could snatch from these household cares, was spent by her in literary work.”¹¹

Chief among Marsh’s literary work of this period in the US were two volumes of translation that reflect her transnational interests: The Hallig, or the Sheepfold in the Waters: A Tale of Humble Life on the Coast of Schleswig (1856) and Wolfe of the Knoll, and other Poems (1860).¹² As translations these books reflect her cross-cultural linguistic skills. However, they also demonstrate two additional notable features. While The Hallig demonstrates fewer translating demands because, as prose, it did not necessitate that Marsh wrestle with rhyme and meter, it includes a preface in which she delineates her views of theology, literature, and their relationship to a culture—an important revelation. The views emerged from her time as a Protestant US citizen who had lived and traveled in Muslim cultures and had traveled through Roman Catholic ones as well. She explained, for example, “The religion of a people is … influential in the formation of … national character … and if we would rightly estimate their social, moral, and intellectual condition, we must become acquainted with their faith … their government and the spirit of their laws.”¹³ Marsh carried this attitude toward religious and political practices, languages, and tales passed on orally with her into Italy.

Reflecting Marsh’s ongoing balance of both familial duty and literary calling, the second translated volume’s significance emerges within one of her first published poems—a poem of adoration for George (Appendix A). In this ode to her “Beloved,” she wrote of her husband as her “teacher,” who introduced her to a world larger than what she would have known. The lines explain that his “beloved voice,” sharing “many a sage’s, many a nation’s lore,” had “charmed” her “ear” and given her “culture.” When her “eyes could look no more” upon “page sublime,” his teaching lifted her soul “above each selfish care.”¹⁴

Indeed, Marsh’s lengthy time in Italy was instigated by George’s appointment, and both hoped that her health would be improved by it. They both also were optimistic about the financial sustenance the position would provide.¹⁵ While living first at Turin, Marsh began extensive journaling, which complements scenes described in letters to family. Seventeen notebooks, comprising approximately one thousand manuscript pages, record the period of 1861 to 1865. The journal pages provide glimpses of her concerns for the impoverished and their lack of education, about the attitudes of both Roman Catholics and non-Catholic religious reformers, and with the behaviors of aristocracy, who gave little attention to their marriage vows.¹⁶ While these concerns are not surprising for a nineteenth-century Protestant American abroad, Marsh’s private writings also give glimpses of how she changed through her experiences and interactions, pulled by her callings as social activist and expressive author.

Following Turin, Marsh moved with George as the Kingdom of Italy’s capital moved to Florence and then to Rome. She remained abroad until just after her husband’s death in 1882. During these two decades, she not only fulfilled the role of ambassador’s wife, greeting and entertaining visitors from throughout Europe and the US, but also served as surrogate mother to nieces and nephews and Italian adopted children. She engaged with activism through the Italian war efforts and establishment of Salvatore Ferretti’s “orphan asylum” in Florence and supported English philanthropy with Turkish immigrants to London. Throughout these years, then, she found her vocation not only as ambasciatrice assisting her husband but as an activist and author herself, engaged with writing and translating as well as social reform.

Emily Bliss Gould:
Glimpsing Garibaldi’s Redshirts, Remembering Sunday Schools

Like Marsh, Gould went abroad in 1860 accompanied by her husband and hoping a change in health would be brought about by Italy’s sunny clime. In the two decades that followed her marriage in 1853, Gould rose from what might be seen as the feeble or “invalid” spouse of a physician to a forceful woman with her own utopian visions of social improvements and specific paths for achieving them. Gould prepared for social activism in her youth. One biographer, Leonard Woolsey Bacon, described Gould in her early years as “distinguished in New York society” by “youthful beauty and grace” and having “fine feminine wit and address … such as to fit her for an easy and unenvied leadership in whatever social circle she might enter.” He continued that “to these attractive qualities were added a true dignity of Christian discipleship, and an ‘enthusiasm of humanity,’ which had endeared her to a multitude, not only of the high, but of the lowly.”¹⁷ Another sketch described her as having taught a Sunday School class of forty “when herself little more than a child.”¹⁸ And an autobiographical evangelistic sketch Gould wrote for the American Tract Society’s Little Pilgrims (1866) tells the story of a young girl, the title’s “Little Caroline,” who becomes a Sunday School teacher among the urban impoverished.¹⁹ “Little Caroline” drew from Gould’s early experiences in New York but more importantly signals the memories and dreams Gould carried abroad with her, which reemerged as she observed Italian children she deemed in need of education. Filling out the six years before the tale appeared, Gould’s venture across the Atlantic and her initial reactions to Europe add to her backstory.

After a nine-month journey across the Atlantic and continental Europe, Gould arrived in Rome in February 1861. Like most traveling, literate women, she recorded extensively in her journal many vivid responses to what she saw upon her arrival in Europe, contributing to her developing writing career and later published sketches. The entries follow the typical Grand Tour route, moving overland from Le Havre, France, and crossing the Alps into the Italian peninsula. Once in Italy, Gould moved from Turin to...