Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  In response to James’s sufferings over what they came to call “the Elizabeth affair,” so similar to her own misdirected passion for George Davis, Margaret wrote with the wisdom—and arrogance—of the freshly wounded: “What you have felt has answered every purpose in aiding to form your character,” but “I do not think you are now capable of feeling or inspiring a constant and ardent attachment.” Acting impulsively to stall the courtship before it advanced any further, and with an imperiousness learned from her commanding father, Margaret pocketed a letter of apology James had written after a disagreement with his “fair Elschen,” as the two cousins referred to Elizabeth in their letters, and never delivered it. Even if Margaret wasn’t competing for James’s heart, she could ensure they both remained single as they pursued their Germanic studies, their “extraordinary, generous seeking” together.

  When James discovered Margaret’s deception, he accused her of deliberately preventing the reconciliation he had hoped to achieve, but then meekly accepted her explanation. “I looked upon you at that time as a man infatuated,” Margaret told James, “and thought your fever must work itself off and that your pains would not be lessened by such sympathy as [Elizabeth] could offer.” She might as well have been writing about herself and George Davis. And James’s surprising deference only confirmed Margaret’s opinion that he wasn’t ready for marriage.

  Nevertheless, their parallel romantic failures, their obvious intimacy, and their frequent appearances together at social gatherings stirred speculation on the nature of James and Margaret’s friendship. James’s doting grandfather Freeman, disturbed by a visit the two friends paid him in which he had been surprised by Margaret’s “cross mouth,” worried that his grandson would “go and marry that woman and be miserable all the days of his life.” Yet their common romantic yearnings for lovers who had spurned them made their friendship safe and fueled their mutual passion for the great Romantic texts—Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Novalis’s Hymns to the Night—which featured protagonists suffering in equal measure from lost loves and undirected ambition.

  The spring of 1831 brought Margaret’s twenty-first birthday, and soon after, the startling news that Timothy, discouraged with politics and the law, planned to move the family out of Cambridge and set himself up as a gentleman farmer. Timothy would spend his new leisure writing a history of the United States; if he couldn’t make history, he would write it. In the “bitter months” that followed, Margaret suffered the first onslaught of the fierce headaches that would plague her recurrently through much of her adult life, often accompanied with fatigue and depression.

  Timothy called in a doctor. Margaret was bled, and plied with medications, and allowed to sleep away her days until “my nerves became calmed.” Still, her father put the spacious Dana mansion up for sale in late summer and made arrangements for the family to share quarters with his brother Abraham while he looked for a country property to buy. The youngest and the only one of the Fuller brothers not to attend college, Margaret’s rich uncle Abraham had made a point of displaying his greater prosperity, achieved through crafty real-estate investments during the lean years of the Jefferson embargo, by acquiring a Cambridge showplace, the Brattle House on old Tory Row, a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard and situated on elaborately cultivated grounds that stretched down to the Charles River. Even more imperious than Timothy, Abraham Fuller had never married but fancied himself a ladies’ man; more likely he’d had trouble finding a woman willing to live with him in the Brattle House, which he ran like a small fiefdom. Margaret had already experienced Abraham’s dictatorial manner. During the months her father had been away in Washington, Abraham managed the family accounts, doling out only on request the modest sums her mother required and faulting her for any expenditures he considered frivolous.

  The immediate prospect of living once again under her exacting uncle’s supervision felt to Margaret like entering “prison.” Long-range prospects appeared even worse: to be removed from the friends, libraries, cultural events, and social gatherings she depended on to spark her thoughts was an intellectual death sentence. She later posed her alter ego Mariana gazing dreamily at the green landscape from a boarding school modeled on Miss Prescott’s rustic academy, but Margaret preferred nature within easy reach of an urban perch—the blooms in her mother’s garden in Cambridgeport, the view of the Blue Hills from the upstairs windows of the Dana mansion, the gentle slopes of Mount Auburn reached after a brisk walk from Harvard Yard. And country life meant little relief from her role as spinster older sister, consigned to tutoring a large brood of younger siblings as well as carrying out a long list of daily household chores. The loss of “my child” Edward, who might have been a consolation, accentuated what already seemed “a great burden of family cares.” Was this all that her precocity would amount to? Timothy Fuller, once eager to see his daughter make a propitious match, seemed to think so, now promising Margaret a trip to Europe only as a distant reward for seeing all of her brothers enrolled at Harvard. Little Lloyd was just learning his alphabet.

  Margaret’s longing for George Davis flared in the crisis. He became “a walking memento mori—haunting [my] day-dreams,” she would write to James. In her depression, she thought once again how George Davis had seemed her ideal mate, “the only person who can appreciate my true self.” In her journal she confided that “there is no person whose companionship would be endurable to me—except one—and reason forbids me even to wish for that person’s society—reason alas! pride too—In a profound but not a cold reserve I must shroud my heart, if I would escape the most deadly wounds.” She had taken the language of Goethe’s Sorrows as her own.

  The passions Margaret allowed herself to feel and respond to now were for women. During the past year she had enjoyed climbing the rocks above the harbor at Lynn, ten miles north of Boston, with Elizabeth Randall—“more sweet and lovely than ever and I in highest glee”—nearly as much as James might have, and she regaled him with the story. The younger Anna Barker, when in town, held Margaret fascinated. Anna was her “divinest love,” Margaret would write; theirs was “the same love we shall feel when we are angels.”

  Just as Margaret had divined the truth about James’s attraction to Elizabeth Randall, James intuited the source of Margaret’s passion for Anna: “how she idolizes you, how happy it must make you to be loved by her so much.” But even if Anna’s adoration served to soothe Margaret’s wounded heart, “the sympathy, the interest” were not, by any means, all on Anna’s side. “I loved Anna for a time,” Margaret wrote in a later reminiscence, “with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel—Her face was always gleaming before me, her voice was echoing in my ear, all poetic thoughts clustered round the dear image.” While Margaret’s idealizing passion for Anna resembled her exalted feelings for George Davis, and the two young women sometimes shared a bed at night while visiting each other, the love between them, as James’s reaction shows, would not have provoked gossip or carried the same label—homosexual—as it would a century later. Such same-sex “loves” might be exclusive and rhapsodic, but they did not brand the lovers as outside the norm, as lesbians. The key to Margaret’s ability to feel such a love just now, however, may not have been Anna’s safely tantalizing femininity, but her lengthy absences; as long as Anna remained more “image” than reality, she was no threat to Margaret’s disciplined study.

  For it was the friendship with James Clarke, their shared enterprise, that supplied Margaret with all she had missed from George Davis, and without the distracting romantic heat or tussle for dominance. James recognized, as George-Sylvain had not, Margaret’s “secret riches within”—her extensive resources of mind, heart, and soul. He catalogued them in his journal as an extraordinary mix of “sympathies most wide, with reasoning powers most active and unshackled,” and “an understanding that revels in the widest prospects.” James understood too, as few men ever would, the bind Margaret was in. To have, as he saw it, so clear a “conscious
ness” of her abilities that she must suffer acute frustration from their lack of outlet was the chief “evil” of life for Margaret: “her powers immeasurably transcend her sphere.” In his journal James could not help but wonder “what is the effect of these powers. She is not happy—it all ends in nothing . . . she has no sphere of action. Why was she a woman?” A despairing Margaret asked herself the same question, noting bitterly, with the same astute consciousness Clarke identified, that “men never, in any extreme of despair, wished to be women.”

  Perhaps it was because he too was suffering more than heartache that James could summon such empathy for Margaret. At the start of their year of intense German study, he’d been forced to take a year off from divinity school to teach at the Port School in order to raise tuition money; then, partway through his year of teaching, his father died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, with James standing by. His mourning for the impecunious yet goodhearted Samuel Clarke was deepened with the death that same year of the intellectual father he shared with Margaret: Goethe died in Weimar at eighty-two. Unwilling to turn to his grandfather Freeman, who had refused to pay for the second year of his divinity school training, James relied on Margaret as his chief emotional support; she was the one person he could go to “full of self dissatisfaction” and come away “excited & ready to exert myself.”

  Margaret was fortunate that the impulses of Romanticism had brought her together with James Clarke; the literature they explored was suffused with emotionality, suffering, and struggle. By their own example, Goethe, Schiller, and the others gave their male readers permission to be more expressive of their feelings and so to understand and accept a woman’s emotions more readily. Although they were not lovers, Margaret and James could still offer each other small gestures of physical comfort. On one occasion, “her kind pressure of my hand when I was in as miserable a mood” had “rejoiced” James, and he offered her the same one day when she had come to him “with tears glistening in her eyes . . . [and] expressed feelings of infinite capacities unsatisfied, powers unemployed & wasting, wants & burning desires unmet.” Whether Margaret had intended to or not, she had established with James a “limitless confidence” that served them both well.

  Yet even James could make a misstep. When he suggested to Margaret, in the fall of 1832, that she solve her problems by becoming a writer—“you are destined to be an author,” he had written; “I shall yet see you wholly against your will and drawn by circumstances, become the founder of an American literature!” —she was affronted that James “should think me fit for nothing but to write books.” If she were to “fulfil your prediction,” Margaret snapped, “it will be indeed ‘against my will’ and I am sure I shall never be happy.” Her “bias” was not toward writing, as he should have known, but “towards the living and practical.” Although she was always on the lookout for the work of those she considered serious women writers, Margaret had developed an abhorrence for the sentimental novels that seemed a woman’s best route to literary fame; she wrote James that she had little in common with “women authors’ mental history.”

  And she was right. What man with similar powers of reasoning and speech would have been advised to confine his ambitions to the printed page? Timothy Fuller had given Margaret a lawyer’s training in rational argument; he’d coached and prodded until she could think on her feet just as well as he could. On her own, she had given herself an education equal to that of the young men around her studying for law or the ministry; in their company she could argue or sermonize on almost any subject as well as or better than all of them. Indeed, James had already sent her a draft of a sermon he was preparing and asked her opinion. Some years later Margaret would write to James, after hearing an elite roster of Massachusetts statesmen deliver eulogies on the death of Lafayette to an enthusiastic crowd, “I felt as I have so often done before if I were a man decidedly the gift I would choose should be that of eloquence—That power of forcing the vital currents of thousands of human hearts into one current.” The power of captivating an audience, however fleeting, attracted her above “a more extensive fame, a more permanent influence” in literature. The sad truth was, she already had that power, but no way of exercising it.

  Rebuffed, but still concerned for his friend, James wrote about Margaret in his journal, “She has nothing to do—no place in the world & fears she never shall have.” Privately he wished she might fall in love with someone more responsive than George Davis and “have someone to reverence.” Such a love might give her a “sphere of duty,” if not of “action,” and a man into whom she could transfer her ambitions and see them realized. As much as he loved his friend, he could not imagine for her any other means to happiness than the kind of marriage he looked for—with wife as helpmeet.

  If she had known of these thoughts, Margaret would surely have been even more angry than she’d been at James’s suggestion that she become a writer. Guessing that, he withheld them. Yet part of Margaret’s struggle during these months was with this very question. She had an instinct, she would later write, “from a very early age . . . that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn.” In time she would become convinced that she was not meant to experience “more extended personal relations” and that “self-dependence,” as she called it, would have to suffice, making her a lone “pilgrim and sojourner on earth.” Her questing would never end, and she must learn to “be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife.” But for now, she felt only anxiety about the future.

  Margaret’s greatest frustration was to undergo all this while still living as a dependent in her father’s household—subject to his whims about where the family would live, even what she must do each day. Timothy, who she recognized had given her the gift of treating her, when a child, “not as a plaything, but as a living mind,” had nonetheless failed to help her find an outlet for the capabilities he once fostered so avidly. She began to see that he had made the mistake of so many well-meaning parents who try to make children “conform to an object and standard of their own” rather than help them to “live a new life.” Now their frustrations mirrored each other’s—neither had yet found a way to be effective in the world, to have their talents appreciated. Timothy had molded Margaret in his own image of frustrated ambition, and that had left her with nothing to do and no place to go, except his home.

  Margaret had Timothy’s bullheadedness too, so when he ordered her to go to church on Thanksgiving the year she turned twenty-one, this young woman who had six volumes of the godless Goethe’s complete works in her room, who “always suffered much in church from a feeling of disunion with the hearers and dissent from the preacher,” went only grudgingly, and sat in the family pew feeling a “strange anguish, this dread uncertainty.” She thought of her “unrecognized” powers, of how “the past was worthless, the future hopeless,” yet “my aspiration seemed very high.” She waited impatiently for the sermon to end so she could escape the confining space, the predictable worship service—“that I might get into the free air.” Church was no place for Margaret, nor for any woman who wished to lead, to be eloquent, to be heard.

  She left the church and walked fast, almost running, over the barren fields stretching between Old Cambridge and the Port, her old neighborhood. She found a stream she’d observed in springtime as a rushing torrent, now “voiceless, choked with withered leaves,” yet, she marveled, “it did not quite lose itself in the earth.” She pressed on to a grove of trees surrounding a “pool, dark and silent,” a place that would serve for reflection, for resolution, as the late-afternoon sun shone out “like the last smile of a dying lover.” She stood still, yet her thoughts continued to race, casting her back to childhood, to her earliest awareness of her questing self. She recalled a day, just an ordinary day when “I had stopped myself . . . on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is it that I s
eem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?”

  She began to remember “all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned,” how she had struggled “under these limitations of time and space, and human nature” to find the meaning of Margaret Fuller, and was struggling still. The torment, the uncertainty, the “earthly pain at not being recognized” had at last become intolerable. Could Margaret really hold to her vow not to seek “a positive religion, a refuge, a protection”? Not on this day. She looked around at the barren landscape, the reflecting pool, which may have yielded up the very picture of her misery—loose hair, disheveled dress, anxious face, neither pretty nor plain. She was tired of seeking and not finding, asking and not knowing. She wanted to leave her noisy questing “self” behind in that pool—not by tumbling in, like Narcissus, but by rising up. The answer came to her: “I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly . . . that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine.”

  Margaret rushed home in the moonlight, stopping to offer a prayer in the churchyard she had fled just hours before, grateful for this epiphany—this “communion with the soul of things” —grateful to be “taken up into God,” to find her place in “the grand harmony.” She would bid farewell to the “epoch of pride,” move beyond her “haughty, passionate, ambitious” youth, and follow her father to whatever country village he chose, educate her brothers, inspire her sister, help her mother—and never again allow herself to be “completely engaged in self.” But it was a hedged bet, and deep down she knew it. Give up the self, so that “all” could be mine.

  • III •

  GROTON AND PROVIDENCE

  The Fuller farmhouse in Groton as it appeared in 1902, with wings added in the 1890s