Under Siege

Abstract

Chapter 5 moves back to the Continent of Europe to find Margaret Fuller and Arthur Clough both locked down in the siege of Rome. This chapter examines the writing that they produced under siege conditions and explores the differently gendered routes by which they both arrived at a ‘serial-epistolary’ form. Clough’s modern verse epistle on the fall of a Roman Republic in 1849, Amours de Voyage, knowingly echoes Horace’s Epistles. Fuller’s letters to the New York Tribune newspaper joined a Romantic epistolary tradition which allowed women writers to write about politics. Both writers produced experimental work which was very modern in its hyperconsciousness of its own provisionality. The chapter ends by following Clough to America where, at Emerson’s suggestion, he emigrated in 1852. Clough’s enthusiasm for an idea of a transatlantic liberal isopolity is the direct result of the emergence in 1848 of the possibility of ‘serial citizenship’.