Margaret Fuller (30 page)

Inevitably, Waldo found himself on the outside of Sam and Anna’s marriage too, yearning for Cary, who, cannily, kept him at a distance. “To you I can speak coldly and austerely as well as gently & poetically,” he wrote to Cary, who did not protest the few guises he was prepared to show. “Will you not hear me, will you not so reply?”
Sometimes she did, sometimes she did not. “Friendship,” Waldo would conclude in his essay, “like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.”

And so Margaret and Waldo squared off in the Conversations—that “fine war of the Olympians,” in Elizabeth Peabody’s recollection
—quarreled, then called a truce; the pattern would not change. When the Monday evenings came to an end, Margaret made plans to move to Boston in the fall, having decided that even the “purest ideal natures” need “the contact of society . . . to temper them and keep them large and sure.” She looked forward to attending concerts, plays, art exhibitions, the stuff of life for her. She vowed, “I will never do as Waldo does”—flee to the woods.
She enrolled Lloyd, who had proved more difficult to reform than she’d expected, as a boarder in the new school at Brook Farm. Margaret sent the family cow as well to the “fledglings of Community,”
where Nathaniel Hawthorne quickly dubbed the animal the “transcendental heifer,” a creature inclined, like her “mistress,” to be “fractious,” kicking over the bucket at milkings, he wrote to his fiancée, Sophia Peabody.

Waldo, meanwhile, invited Cary for an early-June stay in Concord, timed for Lidian’s departure on vacation with the children to her hometown in Plymouth. The quicksilver Cary moved him at his depths; as his elected “sister,” she required less of him than Margaret did. If Margaret was to be his friend, it was as a brother—yet how could that be?

It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary was now. Margaret felt this too; it was why she thought she would make a better man than he. And why she rarely looked at men “with common womanly eyes,” as she once wrote to George Davis, but rather with an eye to friendship—yet on her own more womanly terms.
If Waldo wished she would befriend him as a brother, she willed him to befriend her as a sister. The disjunction perplexed and saddened them both.

Not surprisingly, it was in a poem on the subject of friendship between two men, his literary idol the French essayist Montaigne and his friend Étienne de la Boéce, that Waldo inadvertently wrote the history of his complicated “relation” with Margaret:

I serve you not, if you I follow,

Shadowlike, o’er hill and hollow;

And bend my fancy to your leading,

All too nimble for my treading.

When the pilgrimage is done,

And we’ve the landscape overrun,

I am bitter, vacant, thwarted,

And your heart is unsupported.

“Now all seems fermenting to a new state,” Margaret had boasted to Cary Sturgis of her Conversations for women early in 1840.
The same could be said of numerous schemes for reform or innovation that gained momentum in Boston during the century’s fourth decade. The city of nearly 100,000 residents had been quick to recover from the 1837 financial panic and had suffered less than other mercantile centers on the eastern seaboard, its conservative banking industry reaping a rare reward in comparison to financial institutions in New York and Philadelphia, and securing Boston’s place for the moment as the leading port of its size in the Union. The new prosperity seemed only to abet visionary plans born of the darker days when Waldo had asked in his journal, shortly after delivering his incendiary Divinity School Address, “Is it not better to live in Revolution than to live in dead times?”
Boston in the 1840s was, in Margaret’s view, a locus of “dissonance, of transition, of aspiration” where “no three persons think alike.”

The fall of 1840 brought dreamers of all stripes together at Boston’s Chardon Street Chapel, a plain-timbered steeple-less house of worship newly built by Millerite Adventists at the foot of Beacon Hill, for a November meeting of the Friends of Universal Reform. The abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Maria Chapman were there, along with liberal religion’s gray eminence Reverend Channing, the young firebrand Theodore Parker, Waldo, and Margaret. Chagrined when a turbulent discussion snagged once again on a question of church reform—how best to observe the Sabbath?—Margaret declared the meeting “a total failure” in a letter to William Channing, who’d resigned his pulpit in Cincinnati and was contemplating a move to Brook Farm or possibly to an “association” of his own design in western Massachusetts. “I will not write to you of these Conventions and Communities unless they bear better fruit,” she promised him; “we are not ripe to reconstruct society yet.”
Still, like William and others at the convention, Margaret believed that “one thing seems sure”: “many persons will soon, somehow, somewhere, throw off a part, at least, of these terrible weights of the social contract.”

Just what Margaret’s role in the rebellion would be, if any, remained unclear. She was as capable as any of the communitarians at arguing the difference between “Living and ‘getting a living.’”
To William she confessed that if she had “a firmer hold on life”—that is, had the money to invest in a share of a communal property—she might be inclined to sign on. But when George and Sarah Ripley traveled to Concord in a campaign to enroll Waldo in their experiment at Brook Farm, inviting Margaret and Bronson Alcott along for a hearing, Margaret held back.
“The Phalanx talk was useless,” she reported afterward to Cary, except in helping her make up her mind to abstain.

Margaret published two long essays endorsing the Brook Farmers’ aims in successive issues of
The
Dial,
written by Elizabeth Peabody, who shared Margaret’s preference for city life over rural confraternity, yet had opened her bookroom at West Street for the planning sessions of the Ripleys and their friends—men and women “who have dared to say to one another . . . Why not begin to move the mountain of custom and convention?”
Margaret sent Lloyd to school at Brook Farm and recommended the community to William Channing and to her Rhode Island friend Charles Newcomb, who boarded there for several months. She visited often enough to have a room in the communal “Hive” designated as her own. But given what she’d learned of the “limitations of human nature” from one particular group of individuals, Margaret had come to believe that “Utopia is impossible to build up” on earth.
She never joined the cause.

She was not surprised, either, to hear that Waldo had refused the Ripleys’ offer of a founder’s share in their enterprise. “At the name of a society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise & sharpen,” he wrote to Margaret after the meeting. The
idea
of “Community” had some appeal: he thought “perhaps old towns & old houses,” such as his own, might be turned to a similar purpose “under the kingdom of the New Spirit.” If only Margaret “lived within a mile,” Waldo wrote, tempting her closer once again (but not too close), “I should have many many things to say to you.”

Waldo’s utopian fancy turned instead to plotting with Bronson Alcott to establish a free or pay-as-you-please “University” as an alternative to Harvard, the alma mater that had rejected him and that Bronson, with his rudimentary schooling, could never have attended. Waldo admitted that the plan, which would enlist Parker, Ripley, and Hedge to give “lectures or conversations to classes of young persons on subjects which we study,” was “built out of straws” but nonetheless seemed to have “very goodly” prospects, for “a college built as readily as a mushroom.” Margaret might also “join in such a work”—becoming a female university instructor! Again, Waldo’s Concord would be the base of operations: “What society shall we not have! What Sundays shall we not have! We shall sleep no more & we shall concert better houses, economies, & social modes than any we have seen.”
The idea lasted only long enough to excuse him from involvement in Brook Farm.

Margaret also found herself turning down Maria Chapman, sometime editor of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper
The Liberator,
when she tried to draft Margaret into the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. In mid-December 1840, Maria delivered a parcel of papers to Margaret, advertising the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, a fundraising bazaar to be held three days before Christmas, and asked Margaret to give over her next Conversation to the subject of abolition. Margaret distributed the pamphlets at the opening of class but, acknowledging that her “indifference” might “seem incredible or even culpable” to Maria, “whose heart is so engaged . . . in particular measures,” refused to change the topic of the day: “my own path leads a different course.”

“The Abolition cause commands my respect,” she wrote to Maria Chapman, “as do all efforts to relieve and raise suffering human nature.” But she was more interested in the Female Anti-Slavery Society’s recent move to expand “their object” beyond “the enfranchisement of the African only” and to include women. Yet here too the society’s plans for improving “the social position of woman” were poorly articulated and seemed “quite wrong” to Margaret.
She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.”
Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals, a process her Conversations had already set in motion.

What of Margaret’s own self-reform, the revitalization born of personal crisis following the breakup of the “constellation, not a phalanx” she had belonged to all too briefly?
She had written to William Channing of the change: “Once I was almost all intellect; now I am almost all feeling.” The wrangle with Waldo had clarified this; her early ideal of Roman valor had been rekindled: “I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust . . . I shall burn to ashes if all this smoulders here much longer. I must die if I do not burst forth in genius or heroism.”

Margaret’s candid reappraisal of Waldo’s capacity for friendship was mirrored in changed feelings for her longtime literary hero Goethe—or at least for the biographical project that had represented her highest ambition for so long. She had once written to Waldo that the book would require five years of solid work to meet her high standards. Margaret didn’t have five years, and now too she saw the danger in “living so long in the shadow of one mind.”
It was time to part with Goethe, and she did so by way of a nine-thousand-word essay in
The Dial,
published as the lead article in July 1841, the month after Cary and Waldo’s Concord rendezvous.

The epigraph she chose, from the concluding lines of Goethe’s poem “Nature and Art,” reflected the urgency she felt in her own life: “He who would do great things must quickly draw together his forces.” She opened her appreciation of the great man by recounting what she called “the hour of turning tide in his life,” the moment of “choice” that Goethe himself termed the “Parting of the Ways.” Rejected by his beloved Lili, “apparently the truest love he ever knew,” Margaret wrote, Goethe abandoned a life dedicated to literature in order to join the court at Weimar, where he would enjoy “favor, wealth, celebrity.” Like his Faust, as Margaret saw it, Goethe left “the heights of his own mind” to enter “the trodden ways of the world.” Margaret measured the losses and gains: Goethe’s writing was never again as “pure,” yet he felt, for the first time, his power and influence. Was Margaret’s choice this stark? Would she ever have the opportunity or the means to make a similar decision?

Margaret had once written to Cary of her desire to “do something frivolous to go on a journey or plunge into externals somehow.” Yet, with so few resources and so many obligations, “I never can, my wheel whirls round again.”
As Margaret’s ambition intensified, it was Waldo who seemed ready to frolic. He brought Cary to his home, with wife and children away and only his aging mother in residence as chaperone, to indulge a chaste romantic fantasy they both shared. Margaret had published Cary’s poem “Love and Insight” in
The Dial
several months before:

The two were wandering mid the bursting spring;

They loved each other with a lofty love;

So holy was their love that now no thing

To them seemed strange . . .

Margaret had some idea of what transpired between “the two”—the walks to Walden Pond and to the Cliffs near Fairhaven Bay on the Sudbury River, stopping along the way in “field[s] of outsight & upsight” to find symbolic images in the high-flying clouds. Cary often showed Waldo’s letters to Margaret, who would have known, in any case, that the pair had “never declined a jot from the truth”—never violated Waldo’s marriage vows or Cary’s innocence. She could, though, guess at Waldo’s powerful attraction to the “insatiate maiden” of twenty-one, his “great needs,” as he wrote to Cary, for “a new partnership of unprecedented terms & conditions” with this “angel friendly to my life.”

Waldo’s letters to Margaret, written a month later while on a solitary seaside vacation at Nantasket, a stretch of beach fronting the Atlantic southeast of Boston Harbor, sounded the exuberant tones of the boy-men she had derided: “I have walked & ridden & swum & rowed & fished—yea with these hands I have caught two haddocks, a cod, a pollock, & a flounder!” Waldo asked Margaret to send along “a sheaf” of Cary’s letters, which presumably he would not entrust to Lidian to forward from Concord, and to tell Cary to look for a letter from him when she reached her own coastal retreat at Newburyport. “I gaze and listen by day, I gaze & listen by night,” the spellbound thirty-eight-year-old confessed to Margaret, “and the sea & I shall be good friends all the rest of my life.”