Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  Margaret was still a precocious half-child half-adult, and anyone who chose to evaluate her in these days solely on the basis of manners and appearance was sure to find her lacking. She had not bothered to notice that the fashion for a full head of curls had given way to a mere fringe of ringlets around the face; her heavy honey-colored hair was difficult to manage anyway, even if it was her one point of pride. She had done her best job of corseting to show off her waist, but hers wasn’t thin. Daring others to overlook her ungainly posture and ill-fitting clothes if they wished to know her, Margaret wasn’t yet ready to admit that her appearance should matter. She longed not for Boston’s elegant ballrooms but, as she wrote to Susan Prescott, for the ancient “feudal hall” where an assembled company might fall under “the romance of the minstrel” rather than the sway of a politician, and would venerate “nature, not as high-dressed and pampered, but as just risen from the bath.” Words, not looks, were her stock in trade, but it remained to be seen what reward they would bring.

  Fortunately there were many now who were drawn to Margaret’s way of speaking and to her bookish, passionate nature. Despite Harvard’s inaccessibility to women, the intellectual atmosphere of Old Cambridge was congenial to members of both sexes. “There is a constant stimulus to improvement,” one female contemporary wrote of Cambridge in the 1820s, and “even if you know today more than some others they may sit up all night and put you down tomorrow.” A “born leader” who was capable of directing parlor games with a wave of a handkerchief, and always ahead of the rest in her studies, Margaret could hold her listeners in thrall. “How did she glorify life to all!” one friend recalled, inspired like many to superlatives when it came to describing Margaret’s talk: “all that was tame and common vanish[ed] away in the picturesque light thrown over the most familiar things by her rapid fancy, her brilliant wit, her sharp insight, her creative imagination, by the inexhaustible resources of her knowledge.”

  While Margaret’s “sarcastic, supercilious” teasing, her “inclination to quiz,” and her obvious disdain for “mediocrity” still made enemies of those who felt the heat of her scorn (her critic at the Adams ball may have been one of these), she began to have admirers who plotted to gain her favor. Some girls tried imitating Margaret’s half-shut eyes and habitual slouch, in the apparent belief that mimicking her mannerisms would enable them to “know as much Greek as she did.” When others observed her trick of converting her long hooded cloak for use as a satchel to carry home the armloads of books she borrowed at the local subscription library, hoisting them over her shoulder for the trek back to Dana Hill, they begged their mothers to buy them hooded cloaks so they might do the same.

  From her gang of adorers, Margaret chose particular favorites: Amelia Greenwood and Almira Penniman, Ellen Sturgis and Elizabeth Randall. “Each was to her a study,” wrote a close male friend of the time. He saw Margaret’s girl friends as a young man would: “There was A—a dark-haired, black-eyed beauty,” who was “bright” but “cold as a gem”; then “there was B—, the reverse of all this,—tender, susceptible, with soft blue eyes, and mouth of trembling sensibility.” C—was “all animated and radiant with joyful interest in life”; D—“half-voluptuous”; and E—“beautiful too, but in a calmer, purer style.” And then there was M—Margaret. She was their ringleader, too formidable and too physically awkward for a teenage boy to see with a would-be lover’s eyes.

  But Margaret too enjoyed the sensuality of girls her own age. The hours spent lounging on drawing room sofas after tea, on shady porches, or under parasols at summer visits to the seashore provided a respite from her schoolroom duties at home. The girls huddled in conversation, always conversation, for Margaret “never rested till she had found the bottom of every mind,—till she had satisfied herself of its capacity and currents,—measuring it with her sure line.” Margaret expected her friends to “be capable of seeking something.” She cared little what that something was, only that her friends “should not be satisfied with the common routine of life,—that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained.”

  In many ways, Margaret wasn’t a girl at all anymore. In letters she addressed her teacher Susan Prescott as an intellectual equal and wrote to her of her childhood days as if they were many years in the past. When visiting friends, she often drifted away to speak with their mothers; two of her closest friends were accomplished adult women.

  Margaret most likely met the novelist Lydia Maria Francis in 1825 when Maria, who also preferred to use her middle name, was at the height of her early fame; at the reception for Lafayette, she had won a personal introduction and a kiss on the hand, which she vowed never to wash off, from the celebrated French general. Not long before that giddy moment, Maria Francis had published her first novel, Hobomok, the story of a romance between a Pequod Indian and a white woman, set in colonial New England, which “marked the very dawn of American imaginative literature,” in one critic’s estimation, and made Francis a celebrity overnight.

  Eight years older than Margaret, Maria Francis had been raised by an older sister in backwoods Maine after their mother’s early death. Self-taught, self-made, and self-reliant, she was unlike any woman Margaret had known before, yet they had a great deal in common. Maria too was filled with “restless insatiable ambition,” as she once wrote, which burned in her heart “like a fiery charm,” promising deliverance from obscurity. As with Margaret, the “harmless arrow” of Maria’s “playful wit” was often mistaken “for the poisoned darts of sarcasm,” and despite her celebrity status Maria soon earned “enemies as well as friends” in Boston society. The publication of her second novel, The Rebels, a thinly fictionalized account of a prominent Loyalist family in Revolutionary Boston, shocked and ultimately turned her public against her, once they decoded its source.

  Prophetically, Maria Francis had created in The Rebels a heroine who, like herself, “possessed a large share of that freedom of thought, that boldness of investigation, which renders exalted talents a peculiarly dangerous gift.” Shunned by those who once feted her, Maria Francis put aside novel-writing and retreated from Boston to Watertown, just beyond Cambridge, to teach school, preferring that “honest independence” to mingling with “those who possess merely the accidental advantages of rank and fortune.” It was during this period of exile that Margaret and Maria became close friends.

  Margaret recognized Maria Francis as honest and forthright, “a natural person,—a most rare thing in this age of cant and pretension,” she wrote to Susan Prescott. Maria looked beyond Margaret’s “accidental advantages”—the imposing Dana mansion with its servants—to praise her young friend as “full of thought, raciness, originality.” As the two women contemplated their uncertain futures, feeling the dangerous inner heat of ambition, they undertook a comparative study of two European philosophers: the English empiricist John Locke and the French Romantic Germaine de Staël.

  Inevitably they favored the “brilliant” de Staël, who in Margaret’s words operated “on the grand scale, on liberalizing, regenerating principles.” They were captivated as much by the author’s role as intellectual diva in Revolutionary France as they were by her writing. De Staël—whose De l’Allemagne brought the fervid idealism of German Romantic philosophy to the rest of Europe, and whose Paris salon attracted political refugees and international luminaries alike—was the model both young women needed, even as her example must have seemed impossible to match in parochial New England of the 1820s.

  Looking back on her own brief burst of fame, Maria confessed that she had felt at times “like a butterfly under a gilded glass tumbler; I can do nothing but pant despairingly, or beat all the feathers off my wings, thumping against the glittering walls of limitations.” And at twenty-four, in retreat at Watertown, Maria had begun to worry that she’d end up as “a poor isolated spinster”—a more distant prospect for Margaret, but perhaps a troubling one after her several resounding failures in formal social settings. De
Staël, who had inherited a fortune, had also managed to secure her social standing by marrying, though she lived apart from her husband and carried on love affairs without bothering to hide them.

  As their year of study drew to a close, Margaret watched Maria’s growing attachment to David Child, an idealistic Boston lawyer and newspaperman who would prove to be as improvident as he was in love with Maria Francis. When the couple married in October 1828, Child was out of work, so it was Maria who purchased the thirty-five pounds of cake they served at their wedding, drawing on her own new income as editor of the Juvenile Miscellany. Such “was the beginning of the married life of a woman of genius,” observed one of the guests. Lydia Maria Child would always be the financial mainstay of her marriage, and in less than a decade she had once again achieved fame, though this time not as a novelist. An outspoken abolitionist, she wrote An Appeal in Favor of That Class of People Called Africans, the most influential anti-slavery work before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, in a different vein, published The Frugal Housewife, one of the era’s most popular domestic advice manuals.

  Although Margaret and Maria remained friends, after her marriage the older woman became too busy for shared study, and her place in Margaret’s life was quickly filled by Eliza Farrar, who had married in 1828 as well, at age thirty-seven. Eliza’s husband was the Harvard mathematics and natural philosophy professor John Farrar, a fifty-two-year-old widower who installed his European-born bride in a Cambridge house not nearly as grand as the Fullers’ Dana mansion, but comfortably large and conveniently located near the college on the newly established Professors’ Row (now Kirkland Street).

  Born to American parents but raised in France and England, Eliza Farrar had, like Margaret’s beloved Ellen Kilshaw, come to America as an adult after her father lost his fortune. She lived with family in New Bedford and looked for a husband—not to secure a “mariage de convenance,” as she referred to unions arranged for the sake of money, but to find the love of a suitable man who would overlook her lack of a dowry. Eliza would later write in her memoirs—which told of her acquaintance, in palmier days, with London’s literati—of the closed society she had known in England, where “love matches” were encouraged, but only among members of the same social set, and young people met and fell in love at weekend house parties, closely supervised by parents eager to preserve and augment the family fortune. Had she stayed in England, an unlucky young woman like Eliza, with no dowry to bring into a marriage, might well have been pressured to accept a husband below her in social status or a wealthy suitor for whom she felt nothing. Better to go to America, where her European refinement would show to good effect, where men were less “careful” in the financial matters bearing on marriage, and where social class was more fluid.

  Eliza Farrar, like Maria Francis, was already a published author when Margaret met her, but her first book, a children’s tale with a subtle anti-slavery message, had not won her fame—nor did Eliza seek it. Her chief interest was feminine propriety, although, in tune with the liberal social order of her adopted country, she espoused “an American freedom from purely conventional standards,” according to one of her neighbors on Professors’ Row, Charles Eliot Norton. Still, when she published a popular advice manual on dress and deportment, The Young Lady’s Friend, nearly a decade after meeting Margaret, she did so anonymously, as “A Lady,” in order to obtain not public recognition, but needed income, because her husband’s health had suddenly declined. If Eliza Farrar provided a less adventurous model of womanly achievement than Maria Francis—or their shared ideal, Germaine de Staël—Margaret learned more from her.

  Margaret was eighteen now and suddenly eager to acquire the poise and worldly sophistication—key sources of female power, as Margaret was coming to understand—that Eliza Farrar so obviously possessed. She was also attracted to the companionable marriage of the lady cosmopolite and the learned professor. Both were adept in what Eliza Farrar termed the “art” of conversation—with Eliza the superior talker. Despite the age difference, in this marriage husband and wife, unlike Timothy and Margarett Crane Fuller, were intellectual equals; in fact, the wife’s personality dominated. For several years, Margaret spent so much time in the Farrar household, where the childless couple held open house for Harvard students, some of whom were boarders, that she came to think of Eliza Farrar as her “elected” mother.

  Eliza, who was new to Cambridge and still reconciling herself to a permanent American residence, saw Margaret’s “extraordinary promise” as clearly as Ellen Kilshaw had, and made a project of her young neighbor. Her plan was to “mould her externally,” as a mutual acquaintance observed, “to make her less abrupt, less self-asserting, more comme il faut in ideas, manners, and even costume.” If Margarett Crane was stung by her daughter’s defection to another household, Timothy could not have minded the results. Eliza gave new orders to Margaret’s dressmaker and hairdresser and took Margaret on social calls to refine her manners. Shedding pounds along with her adolescence, Margaret would never again be faulted for ill-fitting clothes or frowsy hair. Her slouching posture, the result of kyphosis, an S-like curvature of the spine, now began to seem swanlike, not slumping. By the end of this education, Margaret looked back on her younger self as “the most intolerable girl that ever took a seat in a drawing room.” Crucially, however, she was not being schooled in deference; Eliza Farrar’s ideal woman was no demure drawing room fixture, as Margarett Crane so easily became in social settings. Margaret was learning to play the lady bountiful, to become a “gentlewoman,” as Eliza recommended in The Young Lady’s Friend, who could actively demonstrate her ability to “behave courteously and delicately to all.” From Eliza Farrar she was discovering, above all, that a strong-willed woman could give lessons to other women on what to think and how to behave.

  Although its publication was some years in the future, Eliza Farrar’s Young Lady’s Friend, which adroitly linked Yankee frugality and high-mindedness with Old World cultivation and noblesse oblige, speaks with the force of moral authority that Eliza must have exerted over Margaret. Eliza’s code of etiquette was based on a notion of class privilege within a democracy, and she gave her female readers instruction on upward mobility through displays of refinement—the means through which she had won her marriage to a distinguished Harvard professor. Her message must have registered with Margaret, who as a child had fancied herself a queen even as she thrilled to tales of the Roman Republic. “In no country is it more important to cultivate good manners, than in our own,” Eliza Farrar wrote, “where we acknowledge no distinctions but what are founded on character and manners.” America’s aristocracy of merit, still taking shape in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was open to all but the “person who is bold, coarse, vociferous, and inattentive to the rights and feelings of others,” for she “is a vulgar woman, let her possessions be ever so great, and her way of living ever so genteel. Thus we may see a lady sewing for her livelihood, and a vulgar woman presiding over a most expensive establishment.”

  Eliza Farrar admonished her readers to master and perform daily household chores—making their beds, tidying their rooms, even if they had servants on hand to discharge these tasks—as a means of showing respect to their social inferiors and earning their good favor. In fashion, Farrar declared, the way a woman carried her shawl—whether “dragged round the shoulders” or “worn in graceful folds”—mattered more than the quality of the fabric, because “true taste will generally be found on the side of economy.” A “love of finery” was to be discouraged; mothers were advised to give their daughters plainly dressed dolls so as to ward off an infatuation with “tawdry ornament.” To American women struggling to make ends meet in the financially turbulent decade of the 1830s, when many fortunes made in the early years of the republic were lost in what came to be known as the Panic of 1837, this was welcome news.

  She filled a chapter with recommendations on proper behavior at lectures, one of the few popular entertainments of the day
that women could attend unescorted. Lectures provided opportunities for women to gather material for conversation and to practice their manners in mixed society. Those “who attend lectures together,” Eliza wrote, “meet on terms of perfect equality.” The lecture hall was a place where a ladylike seamstress might well attract a gentleman’s notice, so it was best to remember that a “gentlewoman” would not arrive late, or wear a large hat that might obstruct the view of those behind her, or “run, jump, scream, scramble, and push, in order to get a good seat.” Neither would a gentlewoman stand at the podium to address the crowd; so well understood was this prohibition that there had been no need to state it.

  Eliza Farrar’s program culminated in her chapter on conversation, “one of the highest attainments of civilized society,” yet rarely cultivated in the United States, she lamented. Americans excelled in verbal “fluency,” she conceded, but few had trained themselves to become “correct and methodical thinkers,” and many were given to “careless and thoughtless volubility.” She counseled young ladies to avoid superlatives, slang, and repetition; to listen as well as to speak; and never to gossip or tease. For those who became adept in the conversational “art,” social discourse was the “way in which gifted minds exert their influence.”

  At eighteen, Margaret had already made herself a prime example of a gifted mind exerting influence through conversation. A natural speaker, trained in “correct and methodical” thinking by her father, she had also learned to restrain her tendency to tease and quiz, making herself less “intolerable” in the drawing room. She could now hold in reserve her barbed wit, a faculty she had too often resorted to as an offensive tactic when sparring verbally with young America’s sometimes less-than-well-mannered gentlemen and as a defensive one when she felt hurt.