Margaret Fuller (10 page)

Silence is the cruelest means of rejection, even if it only masks confusion or regret. The spurned lover is left to guess, to hope, to search her soul and her memory of past events for an explanation. All this Margaret did as she suffered George Davis’s silence. It wasn’t until years later, writing the story of Mariana, that she was able to interpret what she decided was his “insincerity and heartlessness”:
“Thoughts he had none, and little delicacy of sentiment.” Mariana, Margaret’s double, loved Sylvain, George Davis’s stand-in, so much that she failed to recognize his shallowness; she had “imagined all the rest”—his attentiveness and understanding. In the story of Mariana, the couple marries and Mariana dies young, suffering from “the desolation of solitude” and the “repression of her finer powers” by her careless, uncomprehending husband, who never recognized the “secret riches within” his bride.
In remembered bitterness, Margaret made George-as-Sylvain a beautiful, vain villain. Marriage to George Davis would have been a disaster. If “separation” was possible, she would ultimately conclude, “real intimacy had never been.”

But at nineteen-turning-twenty, the pain was intense, made all the worse by the sudden death of her youngest brother, Edward, the ninth Fuller child, born the year before on Margaret’s eighteenth birthday. The boy had been assigned to her special care, “given”
to her then as “my child.”
Her mother had too many others to care for, and Margaret was nearly as old as her mother had been when she agreed to marry Timothy Fuller. In the fall of 1829, as the infant Edward grew weak from an unknown illness, Margaret shared the night watches, carried the boy in her arms to soothe him “while night listened around,” did her best to answer the “pleading softness of his large blue eyes” with reassurance in her own. This wordless communion at life’s precipice yielded “some of the sweetest hours of existence.” Although the trial was not enough to cause Margaret to reconsider her brave renunciation of the comforts of faith, she envied Edward his freedom from suffering when “at last . . . death came.”
Margaret’s first awareness of life had been the death of her sister Julia Adelaide; she left childhood behind when George Davis failed to answer her “aching wish” and her brother Edward died in her arms.

George Davis’s friend and Harvard classmate James Freeman Clarke became Margaret’s friend. She found it difficult at first to “talk fully and openly” with another man and resisted James Clarke’s initial advances—even though his were those of a would-be comrade, not a lover. But James persisted. He told Margaret they too were cousins, although the relation, as the two construed it, was at a “thirty-seven degrees” remove; in fact, they were descended from entirely different Fuller lines.

When James Clarke wrote asking Margaret to open her “answering store” of emotional honesty to him, she responded by telling him of her “stifled heart” and of the “sad process of feeling” she had recently endured. She didn’t need to mention George Davis by name; James knew. “Now there are many voices of the soul which I imperiously silence,” she wrote of her bitter discovery that, in regard to Davis, “the sympathy, the interest [were] . . . all on my side.” She consented to tell James Clarke “the truth of my thoughts on any subject we may have in common” but promised no “limitless confidence.” She closed by asking him to show her letter to “no other cousin or friend of any style.”

Still, she may have hoped that James would tell George Davis of her suffering, let him know, if he didn’t already, how he had hurt her and how much she longed for him. Could his sympathy and interest still be kindled? Or could he be made to suffer some regret? Even if James heeded her prohibition and none of this came to pass, Margaret could now look to
him
for the male companionship—the “pleasure . . . of finding oneself in an alien nature”
—that the close childhood bond with her father had established in her as a persistent need. And James Clarke was a much better match.

Born the same year as Margaret, James Freeman Clarke had experienced a hothouse childhood similar to Margaret’s in its intense focus on cultivation of the intellect, though the method had been different. The third child of an improvident doctor-druggist, James had been sent to live until age ten with his step-grandfather James Freeman, the minister at Boston’s King’s Chapel and a founder of the liberal Unitarian sect. Every day was a free-ranging tutorial in the classics and liberal religious texts, the course of inquiry dictated by the boy’s own curiosity. When James returned to his parents’ house, crowded with siblings, to attend Boston Latin School and then Harvard, where rote learning and competition for class rank prevailed, he chafed at the regimen as Margaret had at Miss Prescott’s logic and rhetoric texts. When Margaret and James established a friendship during James’s first year of divinity school at Harvard, they were perfectly matched study partners: Margaret with her self-imposed discipline and voracious appetite for knowledge, eager to keep pace with a divinity school curriculum closed to her by virtue of her sex; James with his questing spirit, open heart, and surprising acceptance of a woman as his intellectual superior, impatient to satisfy an innate desire for an education beyond the narrow offerings within the brick walls of Divinity Hall. There would be no rivalry, no confused love between them.

The two new friends embarked on a joint venture: they would master the German language well enough to read the foundational texts of Romanticism that they knew so far only secondhand from commentary in Germaine de Staël’s
De l’Allemagne,
Coleridge’s
Aids to Reflection,
and the rare English translation. The movement that had arisen among artists and intellectuals toward the end of the eighteenth century in a semifeudal Germany, still a disorderly collection of principalities and independent city-states under the waning control of the Hapsburg dynasty, held enormous appeal for young freethinking Americans. The German intelligentsia sought an ideology to stimulate a movement for national unification; American intellectuals hungered for a philosophy to support a nation newly born, a democracy in the process of inventing itself. The argument for the “rights of man” that had inspired the American Revolution needed only a little pressure to depart from its Enlightenment roots and bind itself to the Romantic cult of the individual, with its emphasis on inward inspiration, free self-expression, and freely expressed emotion—impulses that had already begun to stir a new century of democratic revolution in Europe.

Margaret was a quick study, as always, becoming a fluent reader and accurate translator in just three months, to James’s astonishment. No longer Byronized, Margaret read Schiller, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, and above all Goethe. “It seems to me as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe,” she wrote to James. “He comprehends every feeling I have ever had so perfectly, expresses it so beautifully.” She read with such absorption that “when I shut the book, it seems as if I had lost my personal identity.”
The two “cousins,” as they addressed each other, related by blood or not, took as their common credo Goethe’s phrase “extraordinary, generous seeking” and used it to spur their studies and their personal ambitions.
James dreamed of an influential role in the Unitarian ministry; Margaret yearned—for what, she still did not know.

Margaret’s unfocused striving and rankling frustration over family obligations found answering chords in Goethe’s Romanticism. She began, and hoped to publish, a translation of his play
Torquato Tasso,
based on the life of an Italian Renaissance poet whose close confidante, an unmarried, intellectually gifted princess, complains of feeling stifled in her gilded cage. Margaret was captivated as well by his novel
Elective Affinities,
which put into fictional play Goethe’s view, borrowed from new science, that romantic attractions resulted from unalterable chemical “affinities” and should be obeyed regardless of marital ties.
Shocking to many readers in its day, the book provided a refreshing glimmer of hope to Margaret, who was beginning to doubt she’d ever make a conventional marriage. One after another, her female friends had found husbands—even her teacher Susan Prescott had closed her school to marry John Wright of Lowell—and, rumor had it, George Davis was courting Harriet Russell, a younger woman still in school in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where Davis worked now as a law clerk.

The closest Margaret had come to a romantic involvement in recent months had been her compulsive meddling in James Clarke’s courtship of Elizabeth Randall, Margaret’s friend since their days together in Dr. Park’s Boston school. Margaret granted that the sweet-tempered and strikingly attractive “E.” should “suffice” for James as “a present type of the Beautiful to kindle Fancy,” but she did not believe the two were suited for marriage, nor James ready for it.
Perhaps she was disturbed when James confided that the woman he desired for a wife would have to be a “loved and loving one, twining her arms about me and gazing in my face with eyes full of passion and dependence.”
This was not the way Margaret envisioned marriage; possibly she knew her friend Elizabeth Randall didn’t either. She may have been troubled too that James, who understood Margaret so well and prized her friendship, would wish to be loved by someone so unlike herself and with a submissive devotion she would never wish to tender.

In response to James’s sufferings over what they came to call “the Elizabeth affair,”
so similar to her own misdirected passion for George Davis, Margaret wrote with the wisdom—and arrogance—of the freshly wounded: “What you have felt has answered every purpose in aiding to form your character,” but “I do not think you are now capable of feeling or inspiring a constant and ardent attachment.”
Acting impulsively to stall the courtship before it advanced any further, and with an imperiousness learned from her commanding father, Margaret pocketed a letter of apology James had written after a disagreement with his “fair Elschen,”
as the two cousins referred to Elizabeth in their letters, and never delivered it. Even if Margaret wasn’t competing for James’s heart, she could ensure they both remained single as they pursued their Germanic studies, their “extraordinary, generous seeking” together.

When James discovered Margaret’s deception, he accused her of deliberately preventing the reconciliation he had hoped to achieve, but then meekly accepted her explanation. “I looked upon you at that time as a man infatuated,” Margaret told James, “and thought your fever must work itself off and that your pains would not be lessened by such sympathy as [Elizabeth] could offer.”
She might as well have been writing about herself and George Davis. And James’s surprising deference only confirmed Margaret’s opinion that he wasn’t ready for marriage.

Nevertheless, their parallel romantic failures, their obvious intimacy, and their frequent appearances together at social gatherings stirred speculation on the nature of James and Margaret’s friendship. James’s doting grandfather Freeman, disturbed by a visit the two friends paid him in which he had been surprised by Margaret’s “cross mouth,” worried that his grandson would “go and marry that woman and be miserable all the days of his life.”
Yet their common romantic yearnings for lovers who had spurned them made their friendship safe and fueled their mutual passion for the great Romantic texts—Goethe’s
Sorrows of Young Werther
and Novalis’s
Hymns to the Night
—which featured protagonists suffering in equal measure from lost loves and undirected ambition.

The spring of 1831 brought Margaret’s twenty-first birthday, and soon after, the startling news that Timothy, discouraged with politics and the law, planned to move the family out of Cambridge and set himself up as a gentleman farmer. Timothy would spend his new leisure writing a history of the United States; if he couldn’t make history, he would write it. In the “bitter months” that followed, Margaret suffered the first onslaught of the fierce headaches that would plague her recurrently through much of her adult life, often accompanied with fatigue and depression.

Timothy called in a doctor. Margaret was bled, and plied with medications, and allowed to sleep away her days until “my nerves became calmed.”
Still, her father put the spacious Dana mansion up for sale in late summer and made arrangements for the family to share quarters with his brother Abraham while he looked for a country property to buy. The youngest and the only one of the Fuller brothers not to attend college, Margaret’s rich uncle Abraham had made a point of displaying his greater prosperity, achieved through crafty real-estate investments during the lean years of the Jefferson embargo, by acquiring a Cambridge showplace, the Brattle House on old Tory Row, a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard and situated on elaborately cultivated grounds that stretched down to the Charles River. Even more imperious than Timothy, Abraham Fuller had never married but fancied himself a ladies’ man; more likely he’d had trouble finding a woman willing to live with him in the Brattle House, which he ran like a small fiefdom. Margaret had already experienced Abraham’s dictatorial manner. During the months her father had been away in Washington, Abraham managed the family accounts, doling out only on request the modest sums her mother required and faulting her for any expenditures he considered frivolous.

The immediate prospect of living once again under her exacting uncle’s supervision felt to Margaret like entering “prison.”
Long-range prospects appeared even worse: to be removed from the friends, libraries, cultural events, and social gatherings she depended on to spark her thoughts was an intellectual death sentence. She later posed her alter ego Mariana gazing dreamily at the green landscape from a boarding school modeled on Miss Prescott’s rustic academy, but Margaret preferred nature within easy reach of an urban perch—the blooms in her mother’s garden in Cambridgeport, the view of the Blue Hills from the upstairs windows of the Dana mansion, the gentle slopes of Mount Auburn reached after a brisk walk from Harvard Yard. And country life meant little relief from her role as spinster older sister, consigned to tutoring a large brood of younger siblings as well as carrying out a long list of daily household chores. The loss of “my child” Edward, who might have been a consolation, accentuated what already seemed “a great burden of family cares.”
Was this all that her precocity would amount to? Timothy Fuller, once eager to see his daughter make a propitious match, seemed to think so, now promising Margaret a trip to Europe only as a distant reward for seeing all of her brothers enrolled at Harvard. Little Lloyd was just learning his alphabet.