Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  When school closed for a summer recess in late August, Margaret left Providence for Cambridge, an invited guest in the audience for Waldo Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address and in his Concord home for the week following. The summer months had proven New England steadier in the financial crisis than other parts of the country; at Harvard, Waldo’s message of “self-trust” turned less despairing and more visionary. For those who were ready for it, his “American Scholar” speech would mark a new era: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” they heard. He challenged his listeners to become intellectually “free and brave,” to cultivate “heroic” minds, and more: the scholar must rise from his desk—“Life is our dictionary”—and become a man of action. “The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul,” he exhorted. “The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man.” In answer to his earlier complaint at Providence (“how few men!”), he looked to the time when all men’s minds would become active, and offered this prediction: “A nation of men will for the first time exist.”

  Some years later Margaret would write of Waldo Emerson’s “sermons” that “several of these stand apart in memory, like landmarks of my spiritual history,” and this may have been one of them. She was accustomed to finding inspiration in literature and lectures aimed at men. Why shouldn’t Waldo direct his words on this day to the male Harvard graduates, faculty, and president? But Margaret soon adapted Waldo’s theme to her own use, drawing him into conversation a few days later in Concord on the subject of women. “Who would be a goody,” she asserted, employing the old-fashioned term for housewife, “that could be a genius?” Women too, as Margaret had been entreating her pupils all summer, must cultivate “the active soul.” And they would prefer to, if given the chance. Her question and its ramifications stayed with Waldo, possibly as a key to Margaret’s character rather than women as a group, but he recorded her comment in his journal, his personal storehouse of overheard wisdom.

  All summer the two had traded views by letter on the possibilities of friendship in general and, by implication, theirs in particular. In June, after they parted in Providence, Waldo had offered a tantalizing premise: “what is any friend but a holiday good for nothing if it lasts all the time, and intensating its good always as the interval.” At least Margaret could hope their connection was “intensating” through her long summer absence. Then Waldo had written again, injecting Aristotle’s bleak formulation “O my friends, there is no friend” with even darker meaning: “O my friends, there are no friends.” The statement struck Margaret with “a paralyzing conviction,” she wrote back: she was overcome by a “misanthropic” skepticism of “the existence of any real communication between human beings”—or with Waldo. But when he welcomed her visit to Concord at summer’s end, she delivered a teasing acceptance to “my dear no friends, Mr and Mrs Emerson.”

  The subject of women had come up in the wake of Margaret’s incursion into another all-male bastion, again at Waldo’s instigation. For the past year a group of rebel ministers had been meeting at one another’s houses to discuss ideas for reform, calling themselves variously “Mr. Hedge’s Club,” the club of the “Like-Minded” (“because no two of us thought alike”), or simply the Transcendental Club. Margaret’s friend Henry Hedge’s frequent trips to Boston from Bangor set the timing of the meetings. Waldo, as elder statesman, had already persuaded the group to relax its qualifications to admit one lay member, Bronson Alcott. The other regulars included James Clarke when he was in town, George Ripley, Theodore Parker (who’d read his way through the Harvard curriculum on his own to win entrance to Harvard Divinity School), and John Sullivan Dwight, another newly minted preacher with a yen for German Romantic music and poetry. Margaret already knew Dwight because he had solicited her translations from Goethe for a volume of German verse he was collecting for George Ripley’s series Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature.

  The club was set to meet the day after Waldo’s Phi Beta Kappa speech for an “all-day party” in Concord, with discussion of “the progress of Society” as the order of the day. Awkwardly, Waldo hinted to Margaret in advance that he would invite her as well, along with two women of his extended Concord family, Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Ripley: “who knows but the wise men in an hour more timid or more gracious may crave the aid of wise & blessed women at their session.” The three women swelled the ranks of the “like-minded” that day to eighteen, primarily listening as the men talked and Lidian Emerson hovered in the background as genius domi, plying the “Spiritualists” with a “noble great piece” of beef, a leg of mutton, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, applesauce, and rice pudding with currants. A week later, Margaret attended a second session, at James Clarke’s mother’s house in the Boston suburb of Newton, on her way back to Providence; there Sarah Clarke and Elizabeth Peabody joined in, confirming the group’s openness to female participation, although the numbers would remain few.

  Margaret left no record of these historic meetings in her letters or journals at the time, but they made their mark. When she returned to Providence, where autumn brought out the city’s intelligentsia, she found herself welcomed into the Coliseum Club, a group of men and women writers, politicians, and other professionals who were themselves debating the question of “the progress of Society”: had civilization advanced over the centuries? It was a lightning-rod topic; some members defended the status quo, while others—fewer—saw signs of trouble lurking in the country’s financial crisis and a need for change. Every two weeks, one member presented a paper, and Margaret became the fourth to give her ideas on the subject.

  Margaret was a skeptic on the topic of progress and a proponent of reform. She found “incompleteness” in the reasoning of her more optimistic Coliseum Club colleagues, as well as in the arguments presented at the Transcendental Club session devoted to the same subject—“a meeting of gentlemen” she had attended “a few months since.” She allowed that society as a whole may have improved, but what of the individual? The very signs of progress others pointed to—innovations such as the railroad and the steamship—created or exacerbated “immense wants” in the individual: “the diffusion of information is not necessarily the diffusion of knowledge,” she explained, and “the triumph over matter does not always or often lead to the triumph of Soul.” And “when it is made over easy for men to communicate with one another, they learn less from one another.” It was time to “reassert the claims of the individual man.” The signs were plain, in the increasing numbers of “men tired of materialism, rushing back into mysticism, weary of the useful, sighing for the beautiful.”

  And what of women? Margaret could write a book on the subject, she told the Coliseum Club. She rejected the argument that women’s status in contemporary society—respected as wives and mothers, or simply as creatures of a “softer sex”—was an indicator of progress. Yes, education for women had improved, and more girls attended better schools. But “a woman may learn all the ologies” and still hold “no real power,” as long as physical beauty was considered her only significant attribute, as long as she could choose among only three professions: “marriage, mantua-making” (needlework), “and school-keeping,” as Margaret had once enumerated them. Even Margaret’s beloved Wordsworth fell short on the issue; for him, she quoted ruefully, the ideal woman should not be “Too bright and good / For Human nature’s daily food.”

  Margaret drew on examples from ancient myth, wherein “the idea of female perfection is as fully presented as that of male,” to show that women had been accorded greater respect in earlier times. In Egyptian mythology, “Isis is even more powerful than Osiris,” and “the Hindoo goddesses reign on the highest peaks of sanctification.” In Greek myth, “not only Beauty, Health and the Soul are represented under feminine attributes, but the Muses, the inspirers of all genius,” and “Wisd
om itself . . . are feminine.” Margaret’s dream was to bring the dispirited “individual man” together with the disempowered woman—unite the two sides of the Great Hall’s classroom—and create, by merging the best attributes of each, “fully” perfected souls. Then, a nation of men and women will for the first time exist, she might have said, amending Waldo Emerson’s visionary claim.

  Although Providence wasn’t Boston, and Margaret felt the difference every day, living and working there bolstered her sense of effectiveness. “I feel increasing trust in mine own good mind,” she wrote to her mother. “We will take good care of the children and, one another,” adding, “things do not trouble me as they did for I feel within myself the power to aid—to serve.” To her Boston student Caroline Sturgis, with whom a friendship was still “intensating” from afar, she wrote even more emphatically: “I grow impatient and domineering—my liberty here will spoil my tact for the primmer timider sphere.” Margaret had even read “the most daring passages in [Goethe’s] Faust” to a “coterie of Hanna Mores,” a group of women devoted to the works of the British moralist and writer on women’s education Hannah More, a progressive but hardly open-minded thinker of a previous generation.

  At Greene Street that winter, Margaret was finally able to launch a “school for more advanced culture,” with the addition of a half-dozen older girls “from eighteen to twenty, intelligent and earnest, attracted by our renown,” to the group she had already established. Margaret had sympathized with Bronson Alcott’s notion that “those who would reform the world should begin with the beginning of life”—by teaching young children—but she preferred to engage with minds on the cusp of adulthood. “This was just what I wanted,” Margaret wrote to Cary, as she had begun to call Caroline Sturgis, at the start of the new year in 1838. The young women were proud to be part of Margaret Fuller’s “row”—her favored class. Margaret felt “a happy glow, that many minds are wakened to know the beauty of the life of thought. My own thoughts have been flowing clear and bright as amber.” Teaching had brought “the unfolding of powers which lay comparatively dormant in me,” as well as in her students.

  But she still suffered periods of illness, sometimes feeling for weeks at a time as if “there were no great stock of oil to feed my wick.” She was bled by a physician, and when that didn’t help she consulted a mesmerist—a blind girl who only afterward confessed to Margaret that she believed she was losing her powers of clairvoyance. The girl had told Margaret to stop reading or she would never recover her health; Margaret had come to a similar conclusion on her own. “It is no longer in my power to write or study much,” she wrote to her mother. “I cannot bear it and do not attempt it.” The stress of “serving two masters” had become too much. She read and worked for her own purposes only “a little” each day now and attempted to reconcile herself to the possibility that “Heaven, I believe, had no will that I should accomplish any-thing great or beautiful.” Instead she took on a class of ten adults in German, six of them men. She needed the income.

  Margaret had thought of quitting her job as early as her first weeks at Greene Street, when she wrote to Waldo Emerson, “I must leave Providence at the end of another term”; it was not a suitable place for the “citizen of the world” she felt she had become. There was so much she was missing: Transcendental Club meetings, and each season another series of Waldo’s Boston lectures. She implored him to schedule a few of them for her school breaks or, failing that, to send her the manuscripts of his lectures “Holiness” and “Heroism.” But most of all, she missed all she could have been learning in conversation with trusted—or coveted—friends. “There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes,” she wrote to Waldo, “you, unsympathizing, unhelpful, wise good man.”

  She had written separately to James Clarke and Henry Hedge, asking for accurate information—“all the scandal”—about Goethe’s marriage. But propriety kept both men from answering a woman’s questions on sexual impropriety by letter, whereas they might have spoken to her more freely in person. At moments like this she considered herself “a poor, lonely, ‘female,’” as she signed herself in one letter to Henry Hedge—and she hated that feeling. When she discovered, too late to arrange a visit, that the British celebrity author Anna Jameson, whose books on female sovereigns and Shakespearean heroines Margaret taught in school, had passed through Boston, she was almost inconsolable. Jameson had been an intimate friend of Goethe’s daughter-in-law, Margaret learned, making her “the very person in the world who could best aid me.”

  Margaret wrote Jameson a despairing letter, offering to come to New York City to meet her before she returned to England. Margaret’s schedule would permit travel only on the weekend, however. “You must not get an ugly picture of me because I am a schoolmistress,” she fretted. “I am only teaching for a little while.” It was a darker, more operatic version of Margaret’s early letter of self-introduction to the marquis de Lafayette. “How I wish that I was famous or could paint beautiful pictures and then you would not be willing to go without seeing me,” she lamented. “But now—I know not how to interest you . . . Yet I am worthy to know you, and be known by you, and if you could see me you would soon believe it.” Her distress over the Goethe biography she had scarcely begun welled up at the thought of this lost opportunity. Margaret was reluctant to describe the full dimensions of the book she planned to write, and she asked Jameson to keep the project a secret, for “precarious health, the pressure of many ties make me fearful of promising what I will do.—I may die soon—you may never more hear my name.” Margaret heard nothing in response.

  She devised a plan to combat her loneliness: Cary Sturgis would come live with her for a few months of intensive language study. The scheme would save money, since Cary’s father would cover half the cost of the rooms they would rent together. But Cary’s initial enthusiasm quickly waned, and after weeks of strained correspondence Margaret learned that Cary’s father had forbidden his eighteen-year-old daughter to share quarters with her. Margaret’s public alliance with the members of the Transcendental Club tarnished her in the eyes of the wealthy China trader, whose daughter’s rebellious nature—she’d been expelled from the prim Dorothea Dix’s Boston day school several years earlier—was worrisome enough as it was. Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar” address opened a rift in Boston’s cultured elite that would only grow wider when he delivered a still more incendiary speech to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School the following summer, daring to suggest that the young men follow his lead in refusing to preach from the pulpit, that true religion could be found almost anywhere but in church.

  When Margaret found out that Captain Sturgis had put a stop to her plan, she was indignant but no longer hurt by what she’d taken to be Cary’s indifference. She responded directly to her friend: “As to transcendentalism and the nonsense which is talked by so many about it—I do not know what is meant. For myself I should say that if it is meant that I have an active mind frequently busy with large topics I hope it is so—If it is meant that I am honored by the friendship of such men as Mr Emerson, Mr Ripley, or Mr Alcott, I hope it is so—But if it is meant that I cherish any opinions which interfere with domestic duties, cheerful courage and judgement in the practical affairs of life, I challenge any or all in the little world which knows me to prove such deficiency from any acts of mine since I came to woman’s estate.” Margaret would miss Cary’s company, although the younger woman’s insistence that their rooms be decorated with “nothing striped diamonded or (above all things) square” had both amused and put her off. Captain Sturgis’s prohibition only spurred Margaret’s efforts to draw Cary further into her circle. She wrote to Waldo Emerson about Cary’s talent for poetry, her ardent spirit—she has “the heroic element in her,” Margaret believed —and promised to bring her to Concord on a future visit. By letter, the friendship with her former pupil deepened as Margaret began signing herself first with the shorthand “S.M.F.,” then “M. F.,” and
finally, “M.”

  Despite her brave declaration of faithfulness to “domestic duties” in her letter to Cary, Margaret had had enough. To Waldo she wrote, “I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties’ as the technical phrase is except to myself.” As her letter to Anna Jameson revealed, having to work as a “schoolmistress” rankled, despite any “unfolding” of dormant powers the job may have brought. To her brothers Arthur and Richard she now wrote frankly of having given up “three precious years at the best period of life” to their education while living at Groton—years that “would have enabled me to make great attainments which now I never may” —followed by “two years incessant teaching” to raise money for their support. She goaded them on to accomplishment—“that I may not remember that time with sadness,” that “you may . . . do what I may never be permitted to do.”

  “There is a beauty in martyrdom,” Margaret wrote to Cary, “if one cannot succeed.” But she was not ready to sacrifice everything yet. She willed herself to find a way to “devote to writing all the time that I am well and bright,” without appearing to desert her responsibilities. Although she had put aside her work on Goethe, she had managed two reviews for the Western Messenger, which brought gratifying compliments from Waldo. “Its superior tone its discrimination & its thought,” he wrote of her analysis of the Unitarian minister William Ware’s historical novel Letters from Palmyra, “indicate a golden pen apt for a higher service hereafter.” Waldo asked her to bring “a portfolio full of journals letters & poems”—hers and Cary Sturgis’s—when she next visited. She did not want to disappoint.