Margaret Fuller (22 page)

Some might at first “learn by blundering,”
but Margaret hoped all the women would eventually discover in themselves the capacity “to question, to define, to state and examine their opinions,” to “systemize” their thought and achieve “a precision in which our sex are so deficient.”
This was the verbal exactitude that Margaret had learned from her lawyer father, which caused many who heard her speak extemporaneously to identify her mind as “masculine”; without it, she knew, most women felt “
inferior
” when it came to entering “the business of life.”
Even the most rigorous young ladies’ academies provided “few inducements to test and classify”
information taken in. After receiving a superficial education in a girls’ school, many women now lacked even “that practical good sense & mother wisdom & wit which grew up with our grandmothers at the spinning wheel.” Margaret’s Conversations would provide those needed inducements, and Margaret herself would serve as the model for “application of knowledge” in speech, the all-important first step toward action.

Margaret relied on that “magic about me which draws other spirits,”
as well as on the practical aid of Sophia Ripley and Elizabeth Peabody, whose historical classes for adult women through the 1830s had set a precedent, to gather her class. Soon twenty-five women had bought ten-dollar tickets for an initial thirteen-week series, a rate of pay about two thirds of Waldo Emerson’s take for a similar course of lectures.
The high sum signaled both the value Margaret placed on the enterprise and her own refusal to assume an “inferior” position when it came to conducting the “business of life.” The class included three Sturgis sisters—Anna, Ellen, and Cary, the older two married to the Hooper brothers Sam and Robert, heirs to a Boston mercantile fortune; Elizabeth Bancroft, the wife of the historian George Bancroft; Mary Jane Quincy, the wife of future Boston mayor Josiah Quincy Jr. and daughter-in-law of Harvard president Josiah Quincy; Margaret’s longtime friend Lydia Maria Child; and an assortment of Elizabeth Peabody’s friends and former students.

Elizabeth offered her sister Mary’s rented room at 1 Chauncy Place, a few blocks east of the Common, for the Wednesday midday sessions. Mary was out during the day, teaching school, although she could join the class after morning lessons. Participants who traveled to Boston from other towns—as Elizabeth did from Salem—could combine Margaret’s Conversation with Waldo Emerson’s Wednesday-evening lecture. His 1839–40 series on the “Present Age,” a paean to the era of experiment that Margaret’s Conversations were helping to usher in, began several weeks after Margaret’s opening session on November 6, 1839.

Of course many women signed on just to hear Margaret Fuller talk. Waldo Emerson, who’d been treated to her sallies over dinner, in his parlor, and on walks in the Concord woods, considered Margaret’s “the most entertaining conversation in America.”
James Clarke also thought Margaret’s verbal powers unequaled: her speech was “finished and true as the most deliberate rhetoric of the pen,” but always had “an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment,—the result of some organic provision that made finished sentences as natural to her as blundering and hesitation are to most of us.”

If she’d been a man, Margaret might have become a popular lecturer, perhaps even more successful than Waldo, who persisted in reading his essays from manuscript pages, using the lecture hall as a workroom for his books rather than a performance space. But, bold as she was as a thinker and writer, Margaret never considered mounting the podium, despite her extraordinary capacity for extemporaneous speech. In 1839, only a few fervent abolitionist women dared to cross that barrier, stirring up outrage wherever they held forth, as much for speaking in public as for their reformist views. Margaret still clung to the few vestiges of Boston prestige that remained to her, and she continued to emulate an Old World gentility, the elegance she had admired in Ellen Kilshaw and refined under Eliza Farrar’s direction. Situating her Conversations in a private household—even a Boston schoolteacher’s boarding house—and offering them to a handpicked audience underscored her belief that conversation was an art as well as an impetus to action, and implied that hers was an elite company, such as Madame de Staël’s salon or London’s Blue Stocking Club. Nevertheless, her sessions soon gained the reputation of “a kind of infidel association,” an appraisal that was at least half accurate: the Conversations were more of a club than a class.

For Margaret did not want to be listened to; she “dreaded” the feeling of being on “display,” like “a paid Corinne,” the heroine of a novel by de Staël who entertained parlor audiences as an
improvisatrice,
holding forth on the splendors of Italian art.
She wanted to serve as the “nucleus of conversation,” only “
one
to give her own best thoughts on any subject that was named, as a means of calling out the thoughts of others.”
If the group was a circle, she would be “its moving spring.” She laid out her plan to the assembled women on that first Wednesday in November and waited for the second meeting, she wrote to Waldo Emerson, for “the real trial of whether they will talk themselves.”

She needn’t have worried. As Margaret launched into a description of Greek mythology as “playful as well as deep” and remarked on the “joyous life” of the Greeks themselves—“we sometimes could not but envy them submerged as we are in analysis & sentiment”—Mary Jane Quincy grew alarmed. Mrs. Quincy spoke with “wonder & some horror at the thought of
Christians
enjoying
Heathen Greeks
” and expressed the opinion that Greek myths were “gross & harmful superstitions.” Margaret was forced to clarify: “She had no desire to go
back,
” but she refused to “look upon the expression of a great nation’s intellect as a series of idle fancies.” Greek culture had achieved maturity, whereas “Christian cultivation was
in its infancy
”—evidently an unfamiliar notion to Mary Jane Quincy, but one that seemed to convince. These “fables & forms of Gods,” Margaret continued, represented the “universal sentiments of religion—aspiration—intellectual action of a people whose political & aesthetic life had become immortal.” Margaret urged the class to approach Greek culture “with respect—& distrust our own contempt of it.”

From then on, Margaret encountered little resistance. She steered the group toward talk of Apollo, “the embodiment of the element of genius,” and outlined the “Greek idea” of the human mind, “its characteristics, its actions, its destiny.” Near the end of the two-hour period, she posed questions, among them “how far the possession of genius was compatible with—or assistant to happiness & virtue.” As one woman wrote afterward, “though these great questions were not
settled
it was useful to discuss them.”
The plan was taking effect.

The Conversations continued in succeeding weeks with Venus—discussed “not as the Goddess of Love but as the Goddess of Beauty”—and then the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which “Miss Fuller told . . . with a grace & beauty that was of itself an exquisite delight.”
Here was one of Ovid’s more risqué tales, with deep resonance for women: beauty, love, sex, and marriage all come into question in the story of Venus’s jealousy of Psyche, the most beautiful of three sisters, and Venus’s efforts to interfere with her son Cupid’s love for the mortal girl. Unmarried despite her beauty, Psyche is offered up to an invisible lover—a monster, she is told, whom she must never look at when he visits her at night in the palace where she is held captive. The unseen lover, whom Psyche comes to care for and accept as her husband, is the handsome Cupid, of course, and when Psyche, taunted by her jealous sisters who envy her the palace, opens her eyes one night and discovers the truth, Cupid and Psyche must separate. The angry Venus subjects Psyche to trials—a journey to the underworld, a box full of temptations—but Cupid returns to defy his mother and take Psyche as his wife, making her immortal.

Margaret played the story several ways for her audience, rendering it first as a proto-Christian fable. The myth of Cupid and Psyche, Margaret explained, “set forth the universal fact of the trial of the soul on earth, its purification by means of the sufferings its own mistakes bring upon it, & its final redemption & immortality.”
Then questions came from the class. “Why was it wrong in Psyche to wish to see & know her husband? Do we not wish to understand our happiness? . . . Is the
desire
of knowledge
sin?
” Then, “What do her sisters represent?” and what of “Venus’ enmity”?
And how much analysis “was inevitable, how much was desirable, what was excessive,” in dealings with loved ones?

Now Margaret suggested a Romantic’s version of the tale, as if it were a story line from a novel of Goethe about the unfolding of the soul: the myth traced Psyche’s progress from “credulous simplicity,” she suggested, to understanding and, finally, transcendence. Psyche’s first “innocent” love failed its test, leading her on to further earthly trials and at last a “divine,” enduring love founded on knowledge gained through experience. Still, one woman recorded later, “Many questions were started that were not answered.” Just what Margaret hoped for: another success in provocation.

In later sessions, when discussion stalled or became diffuse, Margaret required papers on the topic, as when Maria Child proposed, on the Wednesday assigned to Minerva, goddess of wisdom, that “wisdom was the union of the affections & understanding.” So many women argued that “the principle of Beauty” should be added to the definition that Margaret halted the conversation and declared, “We should never get along till we had defined Beauty.” The earlier class on Venus as the embodiment of beauty had not sufficed; Margaret asked each woman to give her own definition on the spot. Caroline Sturgis answered that beauty was “the
attractive
power—the
central
unifying power.” Marianne Jackson, a former student of Elizabeth Peabody and daughter of Judge Charles Jackson, said it was “
the Infinite apprehended,
” and Anna Shaw, herself a noted beauty, replied that “it was the
Infinite revealed in the finite.
” Margaret objected: Truth or love could be defined the same way. How was beauty different? Then Sophia Ripley suggested that beauty “was the
aspect of the all.
It was the
mode
in which truth appeared.” In the end, “the conversation was left unfinished & deferred to the next time—each was asked to bring a written definition of Beauty.”

The result was twenty essays that Margaret considered “rather little poems about Beauty (& every one good) than definitions of Beauty.”
As she wrote to Waldo Emerson, the women “kept clinging to details.”
The exercise inspired a new tack, a session devoted to “seeking out some sound principles of criticism” so the women could learn to build logical arguments in their essays. Conversation drifted to the difference between “imagination” and “fancy.” “We found ourselves so vague in the use of these words,” one woman recorded in her diary, that again Margaret assigned a paper. She read these aloud in the following session, commented on them, and then required “
all
of us” to comment as well. Increasingly now, Margaret set aside mythology for direct confrontation of the “great questions.” The “value of suffering to the intellectual as well as the moral character” was debated in the tenth meeting, and later, “what is inspiration?”
By the close of the first thirteen sessions in midwinter, no one wanted the class to end; a second series began immediately. “Woman” was on the agenda.

But how to speak of “woman”? Three sessions barely opened the subject. The conversation itself exposed a seemingly intractable conflict. Some class members tried to articulate the essential qualities of an “ideal” woman; others argued that woman could be known only by comparison to man—either superior or inferior, depending on the quality under examination. Margaret raised the question “what was the distinction of feminine & masculine when applied to character & mind”?

Ellen Hooper thought “women were instinctive—they had spontaneously what men have by study reflection & induction.” Margaret took this as the cue to state her own views. Man and woman, she asserted, “had each every faculty & element of mind—but . . . they were combined in different proportions.” Ellen pressed harder, asking if “there was any quality in the masculine or in the feminine mind that did not belong to the other.”
Margaret said no: there were no capabilities belonging exclusively to either man or woman. Perhaps Margaret herself was not aware of how bold her statement was. Had she been present at the first meeting of the Transcendental Club three years before, when Waldo Emerson complained to the six males present that even the best thinkers of the day were hobbled by a “
feminine
or receptive” frame of mind rather than a “masculine or creative” one, what might she have said?
But of course she had not been invited.

Within her own circle she grew passionate: she wished to hear no more talk of “repressing or subduing faculties because they were not fit for women to cultivate. She desired that whatever faculty we felt to be moving within us,
that
we should consider a principle of our perfection, & cultivate it accordingly.—& not excuse ourselves from any duty on the ground that we had not the intellectual powers for it; that it was not for women to do.”
Margaret returned to the topic of wisdom, a capacity that women and men shared equally, she argued—“something higher than
prudence
” and “combining always” with “the idea of execution.”
Wisdom enabled action, for both women and men.

But what of woman’s “want of isolation,” someone asked, her duties to family that kept her in a daily crush of people, always answering to their demands—and what of the “physical inconveniences” that prevented her from taking up certain occupations? Margaret was firm: “Nothing I hate to hear of so much as
woman’s lot.
” She wished never to hear the word “
lot
” again. Why was there this “universal lamentation”? A woman’s “youth”—even when occupied with children and household duties—“ought not to be mourned.” Another way must be found. Still, Margaret allowed for differences in style, if not in quality or caliber, of intelligence in men and women: “Is not man’s intellect the fire caught from heaven—woman’s the flower called forth from earth by the ray?” She assigned more papers, this time “upon the intellectual differences between men & women.”