Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  Margaret needed her “elected” mother’s guidance far more in matters of dress and comportment than in conversation; where she already sensed her own expertise, she would not take all of Eliza Farrar’s advice to heart. But Margaret accepted wholeheartedly another of Eliza Farrar’s gifts—the friendship of Eliza’s cousin Anna Barker, a New York society girl with family ties to the freethinking Quaker merchants of New Bedford. Three years younger than Margaret, Anna often stopped in Cambridge on her way to Newport, Rhode Island, for summer holidays. Attracted as Margaret was to older women as mentors, she was still, as Eliza phrased it in her book, at “the precious morning of life.” And so was Anna, a lithe, dark-haired beauty as naturally alluring as Margaret was forceful. Both were entering that “season full of danger and temptation,” Eliza warned, when school is over and young ladies must guard against the feeling that their education is finished.

  6

  Elective Affinities

  MARGARET FOLLOWED POLITICS—READ THE PAPERS FAITHFULLY or listened to her father read the news aloud after dinner. In this way she learned, in early 1826, that the Russian throne had passed to Nicholas rather than to the “brutal” Constantine, his brother. “We may now hope more strongly for the liberties of unchained Europe,” Margaret rejoiced in a letter to Susan Prescott. She had come to care passionately for the cause of Greek independence after Lord Byron joined the fight and died there in 1824. (The poet-revolutionary would become an obsession; two years later Margaret wrote to a friend, “My whole being is Byronized . . . my whole mind is possessed with one desire—to comprehend Byron once for all.” ) Now she waited in “anxious suspense” for the results of negotiations between Russia and England that would determine the country’s fate.

  But when her father urged her to pay attention to his friend Albert Tracy, an unmarried congressman from upstate New York whom Timothy invited for a long visit during Margaret’s first summer back from school at Groton, she wasn’t interested. Later she would recall that despite Tracy’s obvious charms—his “powerful eye” and “imposing maniere d’être” —she had not been “inclined to idealize lawyers and members of Congress” or, most especially, “father’s friends.” Instead she was smitten by her distant cousin George Davis, who had moved to Cambridge from his home on Cape Cod to join Harvard’s class of 1829. Ironically, he would go on to become a lawyer and politician—a liberal Whig congressman and editor—but now, as he joined the Fuller household for evening meals and after-dinner talk and frequented the Farrars’ open house, he seemed simply the only one of a bright crowd of Harvard men who could match wits with Margaret and keep pace with her dynamic thoughts, a man with whom she could be “truly myself.”

  Others in their set included her once sharply critical Cambridgeport schoolmate Oliver Wendell Holmes; the sometimes pedantic Henry Hedge, whose years of study in Germany before entering Harvard earned him the nickname “Germanicus” from the envious Margaret; the mathematician Benjamin Peirce; and the future Unitarian ministers James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing, and William Greenleaf Eliot, who later founded Washington University in St. Louis. Eliot complained, as many of the others might have, that Margaret treated him “like a plaything.” Years later she wrote of a fictional “friend”: “Her mind was often the leading one, always effective.” This was Margaret, even among the stars of Harvard’s brilliant class of ’29, the class that might have been hers, had she been a man. George Davis—bright-eyed, with regular features and a soft complexion—was her nearest equal in a roomful of fervent talkers. Like Margaret, he was capable of “intellectual abandon,” had the “habit of letting himself go in conversation,” drawing on his vast store of literary references—and he shared her inclination to analyze their friends, sometimes mercilessly. George Davis and Margaret liked to “pull people to pieces to see what they were made of, and then divert themselves with the fragments,” one less-than-willing participant in their “college frolics” recalled.

  But the attraction, on Margaret’s side at least, was more than a matter of verbal jousting and elevated gossip. While George Davis may have inspired the “gladiatorial disposition” she reported to Susan Prescott, Margaret was also losing interest in “light conversation.” She was drawn to George Davis’s “contempt for shows and pretenses.” For a time she believed he would answer that “aching wish for some person with whom I might talk fully and openly.” Long after their initial intimacy, Margaret would remember that the two of them could “communicate more closely with one another than either could with the herd.” The connection was “so open” and the “intimacy,” through several seasons of Cambridge evenings, “so long, so constant,” that she felt their mingling of souls to be “conjugal.”

  Then why didn’t he return her love? They exchanged letters, both flirtatious and sincere. Margaret told George Davis he had the “brilliant vivacity and airy self-possession” of the rogue Robert Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s novel of seduction, Clarissa: she admired his “character . . . based on the love of power and the spirit of enterprize.” George Davis wrote asking for a statement of Margaret’s religious beliefs, a common query from a young man considering a marriage proposal. Margaret could easily have taken his question as a preamble to courtship—a step beyond the sort of intellectual challenge she encouraged in her male companions. Best of all, he may have wished to pay suit and to contend.

  Margaret answered frankly, almost imperiously, with a bold admission of religious doubt, accompanied by a highhanded dismissal of anyone who didn’t share her skepticism: “I have determined not to form settled opinions at present. Loving or feeble natures need a positive religion, a visible refuge, a protection . . . But mine is not such.” As a child, Margaret had thrilled to tales of Greek and Roman conquests; the Aeneid was her text, not the Bible. Church was a place to let her mind wander on Sunday mornings, to find Ellen Kilshaw, that avatar of aesthetic culture and feminine refinement, far more inspiring than any sermon. If she had faith at all it was in “Eternal Progression” and in “a God” (not the God, or even God) that was synonymous with “Beauty and Perfection,” she wrote to George Davis.

  In words she might later come to regret but would never renounce, Margaret went further: “When disappointed, I do not ask or wish consolation,—I wish to know and feel my pain, to investigate its nature and its source.” She acknowledged herself “singularly barren of illusions” for a nineteen-year-old and unwilling to have “my feelings soothed” by religious dogma. But Margaret did harbor the illusion that George Davis would receive her confidences sympathetically. Whether she saw his question as a romantic overture or as a comradely inquiry into her first principles, Margaret had revealed more to him of her private beliefs than she had ever admitted to anyone, and she counted on him to “read understandingly!”

  Could he? Was George Davis the man Margaret willed him to be: a powerful, scintillating Lovelace who wouldn’t mind—might even treasure—a woman as powerful and scintillating as himself, a woman whose “pride,” as she confessed to him, “is superior to any feelings I have yet experienced”? Margaret readily answered a second letter from George Davis on the topic of religion. He had declared himself “satisfied” with her initial response, yet something in this dry remark prompted her to clarify her position: no, she had not yet experienced “Christian Revelation,” the conversion experience widely recognized as a badge of Christian piety, and “do not feel it suited to me at present.” Reading this blunt reply, George Davis—dazzling conversationalist, yet no daring Lovelace after all—must have wondered what sort of woman he had nearly fallen for. Perhaps he was one of those “feeble natures” who required a positive religion—along with most Americans of the time.

  George Davis finished his college courses and left Cambridge for western Massachusetts to prepare for a career in law. He’d already tapered off his visits to the Fuller house, and after the exchange on religion, his letters trailed off too. “Ah weakness of the strong,” Margaret wrote in her autobiogra
phical story of Mariana, who returned from boarding school to fall in love, instantly, with Sylvain, a man she believed to be her equal “in the paths of passion and action”: “everything about him was rich and soft” and “of a noble character.” But—“it is a curse to woman to love first, or most.” Margaret had loved George Davis both first and most. Had Davis loved her at all?

  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 mari
tal 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.