Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Odyssey (Homer)

Folklore & Mythology Book

Documented in Fuller’s letters, books, journals, notebooks, manuscripts, memoirs

This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.

Related

Entities
Odysseus (Ulysses) · Tantalus
Authors
Homer · George Chapman · François Fénelon

Representative documentary evidence

1837—

A Poem for Rebecca Blodget

p. 1
analyzed · readManuscript page
“A graceful fiction of the olden day / Tells us that, by a mighty master's sway / A city rose, obedient to the lyre; / That his sweet strains rude matter could inspire / With zeal his harmony to emulate.— / Thus to the spot where that sweet singer sate / The rocks advanced, in symmetry combined, / To form the palace and the temple joined; / The Arts are sisters and united all, / So Architecture answered Music's call.”

Fuller, Margaret. "A Poem for Rebecca Blodget." Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Inferred The author is cataloged as 'Anonymous (Greek mythology) Inferred' because Fuller does not name a specific ancient author — she treats the myth as a floating 'fiction of the olden day.'

1839—

Letter to Elizabeth Hoar

p66
read
“I feel near a faithful breast, yet gently put back by an irresistible power. I am like Ulysses near the loved shades.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Inferred Fuller explicitly names Ulysses in comparing her own emotional longing to the hero's experience in Odyssey Book XI (the Nekyia), where Odysseus encounters the shades of the dead and repeatedly tries to embrace his mother Anticleia, only to have her slip through his arms like a shadow—an image that echoes Fuller's own sense of being near a loved one yet gently repelled by an irresistible force.

1840—

Letter to Caroline Sturgis

p124
read
“Here are Chapman and Tennyson, and Mr E's letter which give me tomorrow.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

1840—

Letter to William H. Channing(?)

p179
mentioned
“She seemed to loose the record of past summer hours from her permanent life as lightly as spontaneously as the great genius casts behind him a literature, the Odyssey he has outgrown.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

1840—

Letter to Arthur B. Fuller

p196
read
“But I will not play Mentor much, lest I make you averse to write to your very affte sister MARGARET.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Inferred Fuller's phrase 'play Mentor' is a standard literary allusion to the character Mentor in Homer's Odyssey — Odysseus's old friend who serves as adviser to Telemachus, and through whom Athena acts. The noun 'mentor' had become a generic word for a trusted adviser or guide by the early 19th century, but Fuller's phrasing 'play Mentor' invokes the literary character.

1841—

Letter to Henry D. Thoreau

p243
read
“Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Inferred Fuller advises Thoreau to 'Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture.' The lotus is a clear allusion to the Lotus-Eaters episode of Homer's Odyssey, Book 9 (ll. 82–104), in which Odysseus's men eat the honey-sweet lotus and lose all desire to return home, falling into blissful forgetfulness.

1842—

Letter to William H. Channing(?)

p80
read
“his, like mine, is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, with his deep romance of wisdom, and not the worldling of the Iliad”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. III. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

1843—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

read
“They cannot reef and brace other than in a Homeric dialect”

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.

Inferred Homeric dialect' is a direct allusion to Homer's elevated and precise epic diction.

1845—

New-York Daily Tribune

“Italy. ? Cary's Dante” · July?August 1845
read2 selected passages
“In Greek, Homer is a book for a boy; must you give him Plato because it is harder?”

Inferred Fuller recommends "Homer" as suitable reading for a boy, contrasting it with Plato's perceived difficulty, which suggests her familiarity with Homeric texts, though she does not specify either the Iliad or the Odyssey.

“the white root, detected by the patient and resolved Odysseus, shall have power to restore the herd of men, disguised by the enchantress to whom they had willingly yielded in the forms of brutes, to the stature and beauty of men.”

Inferred Fuller develops an extended allegory from Odyssey Book X, in which Odysseus receives the magical herb moly (white root, black below) from Hermes to protect him from Circe's enchantment. Fuller calls it "the white root, detected by the patient and resolved Odysseus," adapting the Homeric narrative to a political allegory about principled individuals restoring the nation.

Fuller, Margaret. Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems. Edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860.

1845—

Letter to James Nathan

p86
analyzed · read
“I wish you would ask me to explain the difference, the Greeks made between the moon as Hecate and as Diana, and the allusions to the girdle of Apollo, and at the conclusion — to Tantalus; these are beautiful things in the Greek mythology, which you will appreciate.”

Fuller, Margaret. Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845-1846. With an introduction by Julia Ward Howe. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903.

Inferred Identification rationale not yet recorded.

1845—

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Odyssey XII.165–200
read2 selected passages
“When the wise Ulysses passed, says he, he caused his mariners to stop their ears with wax, knowing there was in them no power to resist the lure of that voluptuous song.”

Inferred Identification rationale not yet recorded.

“Let Ulysses drive the beeves home while Penelope there piles up the fragrant loaves — they are both well employed if these be done in thought and love, willingly.”

Inferred Fuller alludes to Homer's Odyssey through the figures of Ulysses (Odysseus) and Penelope.

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.

1846—

Papers on Literature and Art

p37
excerpted · quoted · read
“shame — Homer's be the Greek / My Odyssey in coarse black vivid type / With faded yellow blossoms 'twixt page and page / "He said, and on Antinous directed / A bitter shaft”

Fuller, Margaret. Papers on Literature and Art. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846.