Margaret Fuller (19 page)

And what of women? Margaret could write a book on the subject, she told the Coliseum Club. She rejected the argument that women’s status in contemporary society—respected as wives and mothers, or simply as creatures of a “softer sex”—was an indicator of progress. Yes, education for women had improved, and more girls attended better schools. But “a woman may learn all the ologies” and still hold “no real power,”
as long as physical beauty was considered her only significant attribute, as long as she could choose among only three professions: “marriage, mantua-making” (needlework), “and school-keeping,” as Margaret had once enumerated them.
Even Margaret’s beloved Wordsworth fell short on the issue; for him, she quoted ruefully, the ideal woman should not be “Too bright and good / For Human nature’s daily food.”

Margaret drew on examples from ancient myth, wherein “the idea of female perfection is as fully presented as that of male,” to show that women had been accorded greater respect in earlier times. In Egyptian mythology, “Isis is even more powerful than Osiris,” and “the Hindoo goddesses reign on the highest peaks of sanctification.” In Greek myth, “not only Beauty, Health and the Soul are represented under feminine attributes, but the Muses, the inspirers of all genius,” and “Wisdom itself . . . are feminine.”
Margaret’s dream was to bring the dispirited “individual man” together with the disempowered woman—unite the two sides of the Great Hall’s classroom—and create, by merging the best attributes of each, “fully” perfected souls. Then, a nation of
men and women
will for the first time exist, she might have said, amending Waldo Emerson’s visionary claim.

Although Providence wasn’t Boston, and Margaret felt the difference every day, living and working there bolstered her sense of effectiveness. “I feel increasing trust in mine own good mind,” she wrote to her mother. “We will take good care of the children and, one another,” adding, “things do not trouble me as they did for I feel within myself the power to aid—to serve.”
To her Boston student Caroline Sturgis, with whom a friendship was still “intensating” from afar, she wrote even more emphatically: “I grow impatient and domineering—my liberty here will spoil my tact for the primmer timider sphere.” Margaret had even read “the most daring passages in [Goethe’s] Faust” to a “coterie of Hanna Mores,” a group of women devoted to the works of the British moralist and writer on women’s education Hannah More, a progressive but hardly open-minded thinker of a previous generation.

At Greene Street that winter, Margaret was finally able to launch a “school for more advanced culture,” with the addition of a half-dozen older girls “from eighteen to twenty, intelligent and earnest, attracted by our renown,” to the group she had already established.
Margaret had sympathized with Bronson Alcott’s notion that “those who would reform the world should begin with the beginning of life”—by teaching young children—but she preferred to engage with minds on the cusp of adulthood.
“This was just what I wanted,” Margaret wrote to Cary, as she had begun to call Caroline Sturgis, at the start of the new year in 1838. The young women were proud to be part of Margaret Fuller’s “row”—her favored class. Margaret felt “a happy glow, that many minds are wakened to know the beauty of the life of thought. My own thoughts have been flowing clear and bright as amber.” Teaching had brought “the unfolding of powers which lay comparatively dormant in me,” as well as in her students.

But she still suffered periods of illness, sometimes feeling for weeks at a time as if “there were no great stock of oil to feed my wick.”
She was bled by a physician, and when that didn’t help she consulted a mesmerist—a blind girl who only afterward confessed to Margaret that she believed she was losing her powers of clairvoyance. The girl had told Margaret to stop reading or she would never recover her health; Margaret had come to a similar conclusion on her own. “It is no longer in my power to write or study much,” she wrote to her mother. “I cannot bear it and do not attempt it.” The stress of “serving two masters” had become too much. She read and worked for her own purposes only “a little” each day now and attempted to reconcile herself to the possibility that “Heaven, I believe, had no will that I should accomplish any-thing great or beautiful.”
Instead she took on a class of ten adults in German, six of them men. She needed the income.

Margaret had thought of quitting her job as early as her first weeks at Greene Street, when she wrote to Waldo Emerson, “I
must
leave Providence at the end of another term”; it was not a suitable place for the “citizen of the world” she felt she had become.
There was so much she was missing: Transcendental Club meetings, and each season another series of Waldo’s Boston lectures. She implored him to schedule a few of them for her school breaks or, failing that, to send her the manuscripts of his lectures “Holiness” and “Heroism.” But most of all, she missed all she could have been learning in conversation with trusted—or coveted—friends. “There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes,” she wrote to Waldo, “you, unsympathizing, unhelpful, wise good man.”

She had written separately to James Clarke and Henry Hedge, asking for accurate information—“all the scandal”—about Goethe’s marriage. But propriety kept both men from answering a woman’s questions on sexual
im
propriety by letter, whereas they might have spoken to her more freely in person. At moments like this she considered herself “a poor, lonely, ‘
female,
’” as she signed herself in one letter to Henry Hedge—and she hated that feeling.
When she discovered, too late to arrange a visit, that the British celebrity author Anna Jameson, whose books on female sovereigns and Shakespearean heroines Margaret taught in school, had passed through Boston, she was almost inconsolable. Jameson had been an intimate friend of Goethe’s daughter-in-law, Margaret learned, making her “the very person in the world who could best aid me.”

Margaret wrote Jameson a despairing letter, offering to come to New York City to meet her before she returned to England. Margaret’s schedule would permit travel only on the weekend, however. “You must not get an ugly picture of me because I am a schoolmistress,” she fretted. “I am only teaching for a little while.” It was a darker, more operatic version of Margaret’s early letter of self-introduction to the marquis de Lafayette. “How I wish that I was famous or could paint beautiful pictures and then you would not be willing to go without seeing me,” she lamented. “But now—I know not how to interest you . . . Yet I am worthy to know you, and be known by you, and if you could see me you would soon believe it.” Her distress over the Goethe biography she had scarcely begun welled up at the thought of this lost opportunity. Margaret was reluctant to describe the full dimensions of the book she planned to write, and she asked Jameson to keep the project a secret, for “precarious health, the pressure of many ties make me fearful of promising what I will do.—I may die soon—you may never more hear my name.”
Margaret heard nothing in response.

She devised a plan to combat her loneliness: Cary Sturgis would come live with her for a few months of intensive language study. The scheme would save money, since Cary’s father would cover half the cost of the rooms they would rent together. But Cary’s initial enthusiasm quickly waned, and after weeks of strained correspondence Margaret learned that Cary’s father had forbidden his eighteen-year-old daughter to share quarters with her. Margaret’s public alliance with the members of the Transcendental Club tarnished her in the eyes of the wealthy China trader, whose daughter’s rebellious nature—she’d been expelled from the prim Dorothea Dix’s Boston day school several years earlier—was worrisome enough as it was.
Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar” address opened a rift in Boston’s cultured elite that would only grow wider when he delivered a still more incendiary speech to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School the following summer, daring to suggest that the young men follow his lead in refusing to preach from the pulpit, that true religion could be found almost anywhere but in church.

When Margaret found out that Captain Sturgis had put a stop to her plan, she was indignant but no longer hurt by what she’d taken to be Cary’s indifference. She responded directly to her friend: “As to transcendentalism and the nonsense which is talked by so many about it—I do not know what is meant. For myself I should say that if it is meant that I have an active mind frequently busy with large topics I hope it is so—If it is meant that I am honored by the friendship of such men as Mr Emerson, Mr Ripley, or Mr Alcott, I hope it is so—
But
if it is meant that I cherish any opinions which interfere with domestic duties, cheerful courage and judgement in the practical affairs of life, I challenge any or all in the little world which knows me to prove such deficiency from any acts of mine since I came to woman’s estate.”
Margaret would miss Cary’s company, although the younger woman’s insistence that their rooms be decorated with “nothing striped diamonded or (above all things)
square
” had both amused and put her off.
Captain Sturgis’s prohibition only spurred Margaret’s efforts to draw Cary further into her circle. She wrote to Waldo Emerson about Cary’s talent for poetry, her ardent spirit—she has “the heroic element in her,” Margaret believed
—and promised to bring her to Concord on a future visit. By letter, the friendship with her former pupil deepened as Margaret began signing herself first with the shorthand “S.M.F.,” then “M. F.,” and finally, “M.”

Despite her brave declaration of faithfulness to “domestic duties” in her letter to Cary, Margaret had had enough. To Waldo she wrote, “I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties’ as the technical phrase is except to myself.”
As her letter to Anna Jameson revealed, having to work as a “schoolmistress” rankled, despite any “unfolding” of dormant powers the job may have brought. To her brothers Arthur and Richard she now wrote frankly of having given up “three precious years at the best period of life” to their education while living at Groton—years that “would have enabled me to make great attainments which now I never may”
—followed by “two years incessant teaching” to raise money for their support.
She goaded them on to accomplishment—“that I may not remember that time with sadness,” that “you may . . . do what I may never be permitted to do.”

“There is a beauty in martyrdom,” Margaret wrote to Cary, “if one cannot succeed.”
But she was not ready to sacrifice everything yet. She willed herself to find a way to “devote to writing all the time that I am well and bright,” without appearing to desert her responsibilities.
Although she had put aside her work on Goethe, she had managed two reviews for the
Western Messenger,
which brought gratifying compliments from Waldo. “Its superior tone its discrimination & its thought,” he wrote of her analysis of the Unitarian minister William Ware’s historical novel
Letters from Palmyra,
“indicate a golden pen apt for a higher service hereafter.” Waldo asked her to bring “a portfolio full of journals letters & poems”—hers and Cary Sturgis’s—when she next visited.
She did not want to disappoint.

In the same letter to Cary in which she wrote about the attractions of martyrdom, Margaret asserted that her “natural position” was far from that of a saint: instead “it is regal.—Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen!”
She made light of the conceit, one she had entertained since girlhood, in a “May-day” ode she composed for the Greene Street children to sing on their outing to the seashore at the end of the spring term in 1838:

We are the children of the Spring

Our home is always green

Green be the garland of our King

The livery of our Queen!

But in Providence she felt like an exiled ruler, forced to employ “those means of suppression and accommodation which I at present hate to my hearts core” in order to converse with even the best minds of the lesser city.
She had “gabbled and simpered . . . till there seems no good left in me.”
If springtime brought any “May-gales” to “blow warm & glad / And charm the heart from pain,” as the Greene Street children sang, it was the stiff wind that would drive her to Concord again at the close of school.

By letter, Waldo had turned increasingly confiding—if only about his daily chores. She heard about his pig, his forty-four newly planted pines, his tomatoes and rhubarb, the bugs that “eat up my vines,”
and Little Waldo, “as handsome as Walden pond at sunrise” at a year and a half.
Sequestered in Providence, she missed him most of all her friends, even as the grounds of their friendship remained uncertain. She had resorted to advertising herself: “I am better than most persons
I
see and, I dare say, better than most persons
you
see,” she wrote to him while still in her queenly mood. “But perhaps you do not need to see anybody,” she teased, tweaking Waldo for his perennial pessimism on the subject of friendship.

He wrote back consolingly—up to a point. “It seems to me that almost all people
descend
somewhat into society,” Waldo commiserated. “All association must be a compromise.” But “what is worst,” he continued distressingly, “the very flower & aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society even of the virtuous & gifted.”
Did Waldo prefer tending his garden to cultivating friendship? He had already written that he favored communing with his own thoughts in private over communicating with others: “persons except they be of commanding excellence will not work on heads as old as mine like thoughts.” Waldo Emerson was hardly old—only thirty-five. Still, experience had aged him, with the death of his young first wife seven years before and the sad loss of two beloved brothers to tuberculosis since then. “Persons provoke you to efforts at acquaintance at sympathy which now hit, now miss, but lucky or unlucky exhaust you at last,” he temporized. “Thoughts bring their own proper motion with them & communicate it to you not borrow yours.”