Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  “I began at once to write for him,” Margaret recorded in her journal after settling into the “red room,” the guest room across the hall from Waldo’s first-floor study, in mid-August. For Margaret it was an inwardly satisfying reprise of the early days of her writing career, when her father had bidden her to compose an essay in defense of Brutus and she had readily obliged. Late-afternoon rambles with Waldo to Walden Pond to watch the sunset, and even “long word walk[s]” in the parlor, were peaceful now that their “questioning season” was past. Although “we go but little way on our topics, just touch & taste and leave the cup not visibly shallower,” Margaret felt “more at home,” noting, however, with a tinge of regret that “my expectations” of Waldo “are moderate now,” and “we do not act powerfully on one another.”

  If this was so, the change was lost on Lidian. Suffering from a low-grade fever and looking ahead to the sad inevitability of Little Waldo’s birthday in October, she could no longer maintain her composure in the face of her husband’s obvious engagement with a female houseguest. She retreated to the bedroom. When Margaret knocked on the door after two days to inquire about her health, Lidian “burst into tears, at sight of me.” Through her tears, Lidian apologized, blaming the outburst on her nerves and the stimulant medication—opium—she was taking for the fever. But, Margaret wrote in her journal afterward, “a painful feeling flashed across me,” a sudden perception that Lidian was jealous of the time she spent with Waldo, though, in Margaret’s view, “I never keep him from any such duties”—to his wife and family—“any more than a book would.” Margaret had learned from her own painful disappointments that “he lives in his own way.” Waldo would never “soothe the illness, or morbid feelings of a friend, because he would not wish any one to do it for him. It is useless to expect it.” She might have been quoting from Lidian’s Transcendental Bible. In the end, Margaret rationalized, “what does it signify whether he is with me or at his writing”? She “dismissed” the eruption as “a mere sick moment of L’s.”

  Yet the next day, when Lidian appeared for the noon meal and proposed that Margaret take a walk with her afterward, and Margaret answered that she’d already made plans to walk with Waldo, Lidian was in tears again. The assembled family fell silent and “looked at their plates.” Margaret offered to change her plans, but Lidian, saint and martyr, answered, “No! . . . I do not want you to make any sacrifice,” even as she admitted to feeling “perfectly desolate, and forlorn,” and to having hoped that Margaret might take her outdoors, where “fresh air would do me good.” Still, Lidian bravely insisted, “Go with Mr E. I will not go.” Waldo maintained his silence, smiling through the commotion, remaining “true to himself”—as Margaret saw it. In the end, Margaret walked twice, first with Lidian, next with Waldo.

  Now she heard from Lidian—not a philosophy of marriage, but the simple “lurking hope” that Waldo’s “character will alter, and that he will be capable of an intimate union,” the reciprocal exchange of affection and sympathy she’d expected from marriage. Lidian’s confession only served to convince Margaret that “it will never be more perfect”; no improvement was likely in relations between the two. There was so much Margaret had schooled herself to accept—and by now had forgiven—in Waldo, but Lidian, as his partner in daily life, evidently could not excuse. Margaret advised Lidian to “take him for what he is,” at the same time congratulating herself that she was not in Lidian’s place. Margaret did not “have fortitude” to live in “a more intimate relation” with Waldo, yet “nothing could be nobler, nor more consoling than to be his wife, if one’s mind were only thoroughly made up to the truth” of his limited capacity for emotional give-and-take. It seemed inevitable to Margaret, in fact, that she would be “more his companion” than Lidian, for “his life is in the intellect not the affections.” Waldo “has affection for me,” Margaret believed, but only “because I quicken his intellect.”

  The walk brought an understanding, on Margaret’s side at least, that Lidian’s “magnanimity” had “led her to deceive me” into a belief that “she was happy to have me in the house solely for Waldo’s sake, and my own.” Margaret realized now that “there are pains of every day” in Lidian’s life “which I am apt to neglect.” But Margaret’s own position as great friend to a great—but married—man had its own pains. The wives of her close male friends “don’t see the whole truth about one like me,” she wrote in her journal, and yet “on my side I don’t remember them enough. They have so much that I have not, I cant conceive of their wishing for what I have.”

  What Margaret had with Waldo was still considerable, and perhaps what she was best suited for all along. As Timothy Fuller’s “plain” but brilliant elder daughter, Margaret had won her father’s attentions away from a beautiful mother, becoming Timothy’s intellectual consort. It was a role she knew and could play to the hilt. In the best of times, Waldo saw Margaret as Timothy had—as a “wonderful sleepless working loving child, with such aspiration!” as Waldo had written earlier that summer, praising Margaret for a lengthy essay on musical performances in Boston that she’d provided for the first issue of The Dial that he edited. Extracting Lidian from the equation, becoming “more his companion” than she, was a simple reenactment with Waldo of the original family drama. For his own reasons, Waldo didn’t hesitate to play along. Margaret’s mistake with both Timothy and Waldo came when she positioned herself as a needy child—“when my soul, in its childish agony of prayer,” as she’d written to Waldo during the “questioning” times, “stretched out its arms to you as a father.” Then Waldo disappointed her, just as Timothy had.

  In his angriest moments, Waldo had railed at Margaret in his journal: “You would have me love you. What shall I love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you.” Both Waldo and Margaret understood—as father and daughter would—that theirs was never to be a physical “connexion.” It was Margaret’s emotional need of him—“the holy man, the confessor,” as she once described Waldo—that he found impossible to fill, even as he adopted a paternal style of proud admiration and nurturing: “I see no possibility of loving any thing but what now is, & is becoming; your courage, your enterprize, your budding affection, your opening thought, your prayer, I can love,—but what else?”

  When Margaret stopped asking, all was well. Then she became to him “my long suffering and generous friend,” and Waldo could write to thank her for providing a “fine manly” production for his Dial, restating the masculinist approbation that Timothy had taught Margaret—his anomalous daughter—was her due. Then they could walk in Walden Woods—“interrogating, interrogating” —and get to “talking, as we almost always do, on Man and Woman, and Marriage.”

  But Margaret was tending away. Perhaps she no longer needed a father-confessor—or at any rate, not this one. The disappointments had taken their toll. She listened to Waldo expound: “Man,” he told her, “is man and woman by turns. The soul knows nothing of marriage, in the sense of a permanent union between two personal existences.” For Waldo, the marriage of two people was a spiritual impossibility. Instead, “the soul is married to each new thought as it enters into it.” The result: “at last you find yourself lonely.” Margaret had originated her own unified theory of the soul as both male and female, but it was not one that left a person stranded in lonely self-sufficiency. Rather, fulfilling one’s dual nature made the soul complete, an active agent in society, ready to answer the question “What were we born to do?”

  When Waldo turned to Margaret and complained that all wives “claim a devotion day by day that will be injurious” to the “genius” of a man “if he yields,” she kept her thoughts to herself—“for it is not worthwhile” to argue with Waldo. Margaret, he insinuated “with a satirical side glance,” would “do no better” than any other woman “if [she] were tried”—if she were wife to a man of genius. For once Margaret had no “words” with which to respond to this unconsciously rendered insult. “There seems to be no end to these conversa
tions,” she wrote, exasperated. “They always leave us both where they found us”: happy, perhaps, to have gotten off “a good expression,” but at an unbridgeable distance. Waldo may be a “Great Sage,” Margaret would privately conclude, but he was an “Undeveloped Man!”

  Ellery Channing’s arrival in Concord brought even greater disruption—“it has not been pleasant,” Margaret recorded in her journal. After an evening’s conversation in the Emerson parlor, Ellery followed Margaret to her room and accused her of being “too ideal”: “you converse, you have treasured thoughts to tell, you are disciplined, artificial”; and then, “I shall not like you the better for your excellence.” Had Margaret asked to be liked? It was her sister, Ellen, he had married. Still she tormented herself: could Ellery not recognize her “seeking heart”? Perhaps he was right: “my continuity of thought or earnestness of character” may have offended or overwhelmed the assembled “angels and geniuses,” Waldo and his guests. Yet “I must take my own path,” Margaret vowed, while still making an effort to “learn from them all”: “these fine people with whom I live at swords points.”

  And now Ellery asked her advice. Cary Sturgis had written him a “capital” letter urging him to visit her on Naushon Island, another family retreat off the Massachusetts coast near New Bedford. Should he go? He had never “done any thing” for Cary before, “never come when she wished him to.” Now was his “last chance” to answer her call, he pleaded with Margaret, before “I am once united to E. again”—Ellen, who was expected in Concord on Wednesday, less than a week away. Ellery swore his love for Ellen and “showed a clearness as to his relations with the two [women] that satisfied and surprised me.” Margaret gave her blessing to the visit, never thinking Ellery would forget to come back in time.

  Tuesday passed with no Ellery—and then Wednesday. Mercifully, no Ellen either. Margaret began to worry that “some ill has happened to him” and to imagine with horror the scene if “Ellen arrives & finds him absent on such an errand, when she has come all this way to him alone.” Margaret could only think “it will deal a death blow to their peace.” Too distraught to work, Margaret wrote letters to New Bedford and Boston, hoping for news, receiving none. Waldo wandered out of his study and into her room to read more thoughts on marriage from his journal, listening to Margaret’s rebuttals, but “nowise convinced” by them. Nor was she persuaded by his arguments for “the nuptials of minds” or his rephrasing of the wedding vow: “I marry you for better, not for worse, I marry impersonally.”

  On Friday evening, Ellen—“my poor little prodigal”—arrived in a pouring rain, asking, “Is Mr Channing here”? He was not. Margaret thought she or her sister might faint. But Ellen “behaved sweetly, though so disappointed.” Waldo was now “distressed for me,” wrote an astonished Margaret. He beckoned her from the room with a whispered offer to drive into Boston “this very evening, & bring me back news.” Margaret insisted he stay, but “I shall never forget the tender sympathy he showed me.” It did not occur to her that Waldo might have had his own interests in the matter—that the unexpected length of Ellery’s stay with Cary Sturgis might have disturbed her host as well and fueled his ruminations on the elastic potential of the marriage bond.

  In her enjoyment of Waldo’s rare offer of solace, Margaret had “left Ellen too long alone.” Her sister grew agitated, concerned that Ellery might be ill. Why else would he not be there waiting for her? Should she go to Boston to find him? Margaret could say only, “He may not be there.” But “Where else could he be?” was Ellen’s unanswered question. Ellen began unpacking her trunk. She took out Ellery’s picture and placed it on the mantelpiece, then asked Margaret directly: had Ellery been to see Cary? “He reads her letters a great deal . . . [and] needs the stimulus of such minds.” Margaret would leave it to Ellery to answer this question—if he would.

  The next day brought clear skies and the vagabond Ellery, in fine health and happy to explain to Ellen his errand to Naushon. She “took it just as she ought,” with calm acceptance, thought Margaret, who through the long “wretched” night had reasoned with herself: “If I were Waldo’s wife, or Ellery’s wife, I should acquiesce in all these relations”—the dalliances with Anna Barker and Cary Sturgis—“since they needed them.” Margaret would, of course, “expect the same” tolerance “from my husband” in return. Sleepless with worry, she had nonetheless decided, “I should never repent of advising Ellery to go whatever happened.”

  And in the end there had been “no tragedy.” Indeed, as Margaret and Waldo had watched and waited together like anxious parents, she had gained his “tender sympathy” at last. Margaret’s “great mistake” this time, she realized, was in thinking that Ellery—men—“will surely do as they intend.”

  Ellery never spoke of what had kept him longer on Naushon than he’d “intended,” but later he admitted to Margaret that he had always supposed marriage would “be impossible for him.” By earning Ellen’s love, he had been “snatched from the wreck” of an ill-spent youth. Finally a “simple” life beckoned, the opportunity for “connexion with realities.” But the realities of marriage had yet to descend on him, Margaret knew, and as she read through a collection of his poetry that Waldo was bringing to press—once again, Ellery left publication to his mentor—Margaret realized that despite her desire to safeguard Ellen’s happiness, what she most admired in her brother-in-law was his tendency to avoid “connexion.” Although Waldo’s poetical handyman Thoreau, possibly envious that his age mate had published a book first, dismissed Ellery’s verse as “sublimo-slipshod,” and Waldo himself considered his protégé to have gone “to the very end of poetic license,” the young man’s life, as revealed in his poetry, seemed to Margaret “a succession of ideal loves, and moods pursued to their utmost.” Wasn’t that Margaret’s tendency as well?

  As Margaret was preparing to leave Concord, her essay on folk ballads completed, Henry Hedge paid a call, then rode by stage with Margaret on to Cambridge, where she planned to live for the coming winter. Taking leave of “the true community life at Concord”—a tarnished truth, she knew by now—Margaret felt once again her own rootlessness, but found the freedom invigorating. In the coach with Henry Hedge, the two friends debated “all the great themes”—Hedge steadfastly arguing the cause of church reform. But “I have my church,” Margaret thought. “What is done here at home in my heart is my religion.” Finally she was content to say, “I belong nowhere. I have pledged myself to nothing.” And to no one.

  Margaret left Concord to compose another first-page Dial essay, “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” drawing on her talks with Waldo on “Man and Woman, and Marriage” as well as the many conversations, both formal and informal, on “woman’s place in society” that she’d engaged in since first addressing the topic with her advanced class in Providence. Ideas flowed until the work reached nearly fifty pages, among the longest published in The Dial. The following spring she would journey west with the prospect of writing a book on her travels, as Harriet Martineau had done after her visit to America. Margaret had reached her own “parting of the ways,” and she would soon leave behind high-minded New England to enter the “trodden ways of the world.”

  It was Waldo Emerson who would stay, bound to his “imperfect” marriage “because he dont believe in any thing better,” and unable to forget Margaret, who, he would realize with increasing gratitude in later years, with her “radiant genius & fiery heart was perhaps the real centre that drew so many & so various individuals to a seeming union.” But for Waldo, after the loss of his first wife, an unassuageable grief that was compounded by the deaths of his brothers and son, there would never be more than a “seeming” union. In the same issue of The Dial in which Margaret’s “Lawsuit” appeared—arguing that “woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation” —as she journeyed by covered “lumber waggon” through the Rock River Valley in northern Illinois, Waldo published his poem “To Rhea,” using the name of the
goddess he had associated with Margaret since the days of the disputatious Conversations, and uttering a plaint that spoke for them both of their “questioning season” and their several lost or never-to-be-realized loves:

  THEE, dear friend, a brother soothes

  Not with flatteries but truths,

  . . .

  If with love thy heart has burned,

  If thy love is unreturned,

  Hide thy grief within thy breast,

  Though it tear thee unexpressed.

  13

  “The newest new world”

  IT WASN’T THE JOURNEY SHE HAD TRACED SO OFTEN IN HER mind’s eye—by sailing ship or Cunard Line from Boston to Liverpool to be greeted by Harriet Martineau, then by train and stagecoach to London to meet Waldo’s friend Thomas Carlyle, perhaps an excursion to the Lake District for an audience with Wordsworth before crossing the Channel to France, Germany, Italy. But it was the only means of travel Margaret could afford with what she’d saved from the past year’s Conversations, augmented by last-minute gifts from Sarah Shaw, one of her language students, and James Freeman Clarke. James would lead the expedition in its first stage, serving as chaperone to his mother and sister on a visit to his younger brother William in Chicago, a family errand on which Margaret had been invited to tag along. Margaret had an uncle William Fuller to visit as well, in northern Illinois, the second youngest of her father’s four lawyer brothers—the only one to move west.

  It wasn’t the Wanderjahr she longed for either; there would be only four months of travel. Margaret’s “summer on the lakes,” as she would title the book about her trip, meant Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan, not Rydal Water, Grasmere, and Windermere, where Coleridge and the Wordsworths had rambled. But the journey to the edge of the American West, traveling over rutted wagon tracks through the prairie, by canoe and “fire winged” steamboat on restless waters, was in tune with the originating mood that had driven her to write “The Great Lawsuit.” Margaret would tell a friend afterward that Europe “lost its interest” as she “looked upon these dawnings of a vast future” in an open landscape whose unfamiliar terrain and peoples alternately overwhelmed and inspired her. She had beheld “the newest new world,” and the experience would bring about what she’d hoped for in putting New England behind her, if only for a season—“the birth of a soul.”