Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  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.”

  But Cary held Waldo at arm’s length and was as stricken as Margaret when they both learned at summer’s end that Ellery Channing and Ellen Fuller, Margaret’s pretty twenty-one-year-old sister, had fallen in love out west and were engaged to be married. Ellery had drifted from farming in Illinois to newspaper journalism in Cincinnati and now into a romantic entanglement that, for the first time, he had no immediate wish to escape.

  This was not the propitious match that Margaret had envisioned for her little sister, and Ellen’s readiness to throw caution to the winds and accept the marriage proposal of a man with no steady means of support seemed to make a mockery of Margaret’s own sacrifices to sponsor Ellen’s education and entrance into society. Yet Margaret knew the impulse that drove Ellen. In the Conversations of the previous sprin
g, speaking of the marriage of Venus to the lusty warrior god Mars, Margaret had compared the more serene Olympian deities, who had been shocked by Venus’s impulsive marital choice, to “modern men” who expected beautiful women to fall in love with “their softness and delicacy,” only to find that “the girl elopes with a red coat.”

  In the earnest, high-minded Transcendentalist “Coterie,” the roguish Ellery Channing was the red coat. The only man who could hold a candle to him—in fact outshone him considerably—was the coolly handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne, who’d left the Custom House post procured for him by Elizabeth Peabody to make a go of it selling stories to magazines. Byronic in his looks if not in his shy manner, Nathaniel Hawthorne had won Sophia Peabody’s heart, and after he’d tired of a season of manual labor at Brook Farm, the couple had made plans to set up housekeeping in Concord, where Waldo had secured them the Old Manse at a low rent. When news of the Hawthornes’ long-delayed nuptials reached Margaret, she had written to Sophia in congratulation, “If ever I saw a man who combined delicate tenderness to understand the heart of a woman, with quiet depths and manliness enough to satisfy her, it is Mr. Hawthorne.”

  The installation of the newlyweds at the hulking gray Manse on the Concord River, vacant since the recent death of Waldo’s step-grandfather, the Reverend Ezra Ripley, was part of Waldo’s grand scheme to build up “Community” in Concord—or at least “a good neighborhood” providing “a solid social satisfaction.” He’d first tried expanding his own household, inviting the entire Alcott family—Bronson, Abba, and their four little girls—to board. A summertime visit to Brook Farm had persuaded Waldo that only “living in the house with them for years . . . permits the association of friends without any compromise.” Then he’d requested his cook and housekeeper to join the family in the dining room at mealtimes to promote an egalitarian spirit. Both offers were refused. In the end only Henry Thoreau, now twenty-three and “an earnest thinker” with “a great deal of practical sense,” in Margaret’s estimation, came to live with the Emerson family and eat at their table. He would earn his keep as a handyman and gardener, and Margaret approved—“that seems feasible.” Now when she stayed in Concord—sometimes with Waldo, sometimes with the Hawthornes—Margaret could look forward to evening rides on the river or nearby ponds, propelled by Thoreau in the Musketaquid, the small rowboat he had built himself and given the Indian name for the town’s languid waterway.

  Waldo’s project to muster his comrades in his own Concord neighborhood had achieved new seriousness in the wake of domestic tragedy. Early in 1842, his five-year-old son and namesake fell ill with scarlet fever and died in a matter of days—“fled out of my arms like a dream,” Waldo wrote. “Nature . . . has crushed her sweetest creation.” Lidian, nursing the infant Edith, born two months earlier in November, and tending to three-year-old Ellen, who was suffering a milder case of the disease, joined Waldo in the sharp apprehension of just “how bad is the worst.” From his study, where “our fair boy” had played happily on the carpet, Waldo wrote despairing letters to Margaret and Cary, recalling that the child had been a part of “every cherished friendship of my life.” “Margaret Fuller & Caroline Sturgis,” he recorded in a journal passage commemorating Little Waldo, had “caressed & conversed with him whenever they were here.” Now he asked Margaret, “Shall I ever dare to love any thing again?” And Cary: “Must every experience—those that promised to be dearest & most penetrative,—only kiss my cheek like the wind & pass away?”

  The child’s death did not, as sometimes happens, ruin the parents’ marriage. Waldo and Lidian’s attachment was already tenuous, as Waldo’s efforts at “covenant” and “new partnership” betrayed. He had remarried too soon after his beloved Ellen’s death, choosing an older woman who was his first wife’s opposite—decorous, erudite, more conventionally pious, and, as years went on, with Waldo’s heart inclining elsewhere, prone to illness and depression. To Margaret, Lidian was “saintly,” her “holiness . . . very fragrant,” a not entirely favorable judgment. Margaret would never carry “a bible in my hand,” as she once wrote to Waldo, contrasting her own personality to Lidian’s, and she considered herself “no saint, no anything, but a great soul born to know all, before it can return to the creative fount.” Nothing made her feel “so anti-Christian, & so anti-marriage” as talking to Lidian, whose company she avoided almost to the point of rudeness on visits to the Emerson household, often leaving the house just before dinner in order to miss the family meal.

  In the months Waldo spent working out his philosophy of friendship—in person and on the page—he had puzzled over the marriage bond as well, propounding a more eccentric and self-serving theory. “Marriage should be a temporary relation,” he wrote in his journal during the summer of his chaste tryst with Cary. “When each of two souls ha[ve] exhausted the other of that good which each held for the other, they should part in the same peace in which they met, not parting from each other, but drawn to new society. The new love is the balm to prevent a wound from forming where the old love was detached.” It was an apt description of his own marriage at the time, at least on his side. Cary had become Waldo’s “new love,” yet he debated the subject of marriage more often with Margaret, his spiritual brother. She took a darker view, remarking to him on one occasion that “all the marriages she knew were a mutual degradation.”

  As an outsider to the institution of marriage, Margaret had little reason to defend it. She had argued with Elizabeth Peabody during the first series of Conversations that for unmarried women there came a time when “every one must give up” and plan for a single life. Now in her early thirties, Margaret half believed she had reached that point. Sometimes she reasoned that her “ruined health,” brought on by the shock of her father’s death and the years of overwork that followed, resulting in a “lack of vital energy,” would have prevented her from marrying anyway, even as she “mourned that I never should have a thorough experience of life, never know the full riches of my being”—never experience a sexual union. From opposite vantage points and for different reasons, both Margaret and Waldo yearned for a “supersensuous” connection with “perfect” friends, above and beyond the physical realm, that would provide relief from the strictures of their particular domestic lives.

  On behalf of the married women in her classes, Margaret held out the hope of reforming the flawed institution from the inside, whereas Waldo, for all his theorizing, believed nothing could be changed: “We cannot rectify marriage because it would introduce such carnage into our social relations.” The “boundless liberty” he dreamed of, the freedom to move from one love to the next, could not be trusted to “even saints & sages.” Waldo would not knowingly hurt Lidian, yet he wounded her grievously anyway when he restlessly wandered the outermost shores of the marriage, falling in love with the sea.

  The “saintly” Lidian issued her own complaint, not against marriage but against the philosophy that to her seemed to have robbed her husband of his humanity. In a handful of manuscript pages she called her “Transcendental Bible,” Lidian inscribed a list of ironic commandments, which Waldo claimed to find amusing when he read them and which almost certainly would have aroused Margaret’s sympathy for Lidian, had she known of the document’s existence. Although phrased in the language of an embittered catechist, Lidian’s lament was also Margaret’s:

  Never confess a fault. You should not have committed it and who cares whether you are sorry? . . .

  Loathe and shun the sick. They are in bad taste, and may untune us for writing the poem floating through our mind . . .

  It is mean and weak to seek for sympathy; it is mean and weak to give it . . .

  Never wish to be loved. Who are you to expect that? Besides, the great never value being loved . . .

  Let us all aspire after this Perfection! So be it.

  Waldo now lured the newlywed Channings, Ellen and Ellery, to Concord, promising to find them inexpensive lodging after the Hawthornes refused Margaret’s sugges
tion that the two couples share the rambling former rectory. “Let there be society again,” Waldo declared, eager for distraction from his sorrows: “we shall have poets & the friends of poets & see the golden bees of Pindus swarming on our plain cottages and apple trees.” Ellery would join the Emerson household in September for house hunting while Ellen packed up their belongings in Cincinnati for the move east.

  Margaret was spending a month in Concord herself at the end of the summer, having reached the difficult decision to relinquish editorship of The Dial. After two years of publication to the same mixed reviews—satirical responses in the press, enthusiastic letters from a handful of dedicated readers—the magazine was never to be a fiscal success. As with her teaching for Bronson Alcott, Margaret could not afford to continue without pay. Unwilling to let “our poor Dial . . . perish without an effort,” Waldo stepped into the breach, admitting the need for a “rotation in martyrdom.” The chaotic business of editing the journal enlivened his too quiet study, but now it was Waldo’s turn to press Margaret for copy. He summoned her to Concord, where he promised to supply “desk & inkhorn” for her use in composing an essay on European folk ballads to open the October 1842 issue.