Margaret’s examples of “onward”-spirited, egalitarian marriages all featured unorthodox, at times scandalous living arrangements. Yet her analysis dwelled exclusively on “supersensuous” connections—emotional, spiritual, intellectual. Indeed, she praised the “chastity and equality of genuine marriage.” What did she mean by “chastity” within marriage? Margaret wasn’t championing marital celibacy. Her critics, offended by her praise of Wollstonecraft and Sand and her sympathy for prostitutes, assumed she favored sexual license, but instead of license or celibacy, she was advocating something more radical: the personal integrity of the self-reliant female. “Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation.” The “excessive devotion” that results when women live “so entirely for men,” when a woman makes marriage “her whole existence”—or, as Sophia Hawthorne had phrased it, her “true destiny”—Margaret argued, has “cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.” Woman “must be able to stand alone.” Marriage should be to woman, as it is to man, “only an experience.”
While women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, “men never,” Margaret observed, “in any extreme of despair, wished to be women.” There was nothing for man to envy in woman’s “lot,” and the imbalance was too great to be tolerated. Margaret knew the aspirations stifled in little girls; she’d seen “the ennui that haunts grown women.” She’d watched her mother and her friends become “absorbed” in marriage, their “self-reliance and self-impulse” degenerate into “compromise” and “helplessness.” She’d witnessed Sophia Hawthorne’s marriage of “intellectual companionship”—two creative artists working side by side—become transformed with Una’s birth in the spring of 1844. Out of “obedient goodness,” Sophia had abandoned her studio to tend to her daughter, and then to Margaret’s niece, the hungry infant Greta.
Yet Margaret saw it as an encouraging “sign of the times” that unmarried women, once considered “despised auxiliaries,” were no longer so immediately and “contemptuously designated as old maids.” Single women could now strive to “gain, undistracted by other relationships,” a greater “fulness of being.” For them, and for men who might also choose not to marry, “celibacy is the great fact of the time”: “now the rowers are pausing on their oars; they wait a change before they can pull together.” Did she have in mind, with this metaphor, the rowing race from the Aeneid and the line she had taken for her long-ago theme, “They can conquer who believe they can”?
Margaret herself had become one of those women who “know too much,” whom men were disinclined to marry. But in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, by way of an autobiographical sketch of a character she called “Miranda” (borrowing the name from Shakespeare’s independent-minded castaway of The Tempest), Margaret offered belated thanks to her father for having raised her to become just such a woman. The fictional Miranda had been educated by a father who, like Timothy in his early years as Margaret’s teacher, “cherished no sentimental reverence for Woman,” but rather held “a firm belief in the equality of the sexes”: he treated his daughter “not as a plaything, but as a living mind.” Miranda had come to cherish the “self dependence” so often “deprecated as a fault” in women, but “honored in me” by her father. Although Miranda ultimately discovered, as Margaret had, that “I must depend on myself as the only constant friend,” she was proud that she had “taken a course of her own, and no man stood in her way.”
“Saints and geniuses,” Margaret wrote, “have often chosen a lonely position,” believing that, “undisturbed by the pressure of near ties,” they might “understand and reproduce life better” than by direct experience. This was the “high stand” that Margaret took in writing Woman in the Nineteenth Century—the role of prophetic sibyl that Sophia Hawthorne had once admired in her friend but now privately objected to. From her “lonely” vantage point, Margaret envisioned a noble future for women. They required, first, “much greater range of occupation . . . to rouse their latent powers.” She called on men to “remove arbitrary barriers”: “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.” Because “men do not look at both sides,” women themselves must become “the best helpers of one another”: “Let them think; let them act; till they know what they need.” Then, “if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply—any.” In what would become the most quoted line she ever wrote, Margaret exhorted her readers to “let them be sea-captains, if you will.”
During her last summer visit to the Emerson house in Concord, simultaneously exasperated and inspired by her as he so often was, Waldo had told Margaret that her personal emblem ought to be “a ship at sea in a gale,” with the “Motto: ‘Let all drive.’” The half-teasing, half-admiring remark was one of several derived from Margaret’s conversations or correspondence with Waldo that found their way, improved upon, into Woman in the Nineteenth Century. More subtle than her rallying cry of “let them be sea-captains,” but more profound in its implications, was Margaret’s assertion of the “common being” of man and woman, her rebuttal to Waldo’s isolationist statement that “man . . . is man and woman by turns” and so “knows nothing of marriage, in the sense of a permanent union between two personal existences.”
Margaret’s “law” of “common being” was also her ultimate challenge to the rigid demarcation of separate spheres. While “male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism,” she wrote, “in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid.” The divide was not fixed or impermeable between men and women, or within the individual human soul. As Margaret had told the women who attended her Conversations, women and men shared “every faculty & element of mind,” but these faculties were “combined in different proportions.” Here she stated it outright: “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” If each human soul was permitted to achieve its “fulness of being,” its unique combination of male and female qualities allowed free play, then at last there would be “no discordant collision,” and a “ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue.”
In the journal Margaret kept while revising Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she had sketched two overlapping equilateral triangles to form a six-pointed star, encircled by a snake biting its own tail—the Greek ouroboros, or symbol of eternity. Rays of light emanated from the emblem—her own, not Waldo’s storm-tossed driving ship—and she explained the image with these lines in verse:
Patient serpent, circle round
Till in death thy life is found,
Double form of godly prime
Holding the whole thought of time,
When the perfect two embrace,
Male and female, black and white
Soul is justified in space,
Dark made fruitful by the light,
And centred in the diamond Sun
Time, eternity, are one.
Margaret transferred the symbol to the frontispiece of her book, one triangle white, the other shaded black. Whether or not readers understood the image, which appeared without the explanatory poem, its message of radiant unity galvanized Margaret’s narrative and worked its way into her closing paragraphs, in which she invited women to follow her own example by turning away from regrets, resentments, all that bound and fettered them. “I stand in the sunny noon of life,” she wrote, and “what concerns me now is, that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life.”
Woman in the Nineteenth Century did its work. Readers felt “their wounds probed, and healing promised by it,” Margaret wrote to Cary Sturgis, marveling at the “ardent interest” the book “excites in those who have never known me.” Advertisements dubbed it the “Great Book of the Age,” claiming: “The thousands who have perused this book speak of it as being the only one which has been written, in which WOMAN is portrayed in her real and true character.” As for reviewers, “the
opposition and sympathy it excites are both great,” Margaret reported to Cary, exhilarated by the attention. Whether she was faulted for “loose” doctrine or praised for upholding a “chaste ideal,” Margaret knew she had been “heard,” and the brisk sales, along with the eighty-five dollars she earned from the book during its first week, were the “speaking fact[s]” that proved it.
Although Cary had been writing in an adjoining room at Fishkill Landing as Margaret revised the book, the two women were worlds apart four months later when it was published. Cary wrote of her reaction to the “pamphlet,” as she continued to refer to Woman in the Nineteenth Century even after learning it had been declared the “Great Book of the Age,” from her father’s echoing mansion on Summer Street in “demure Boston.” There, as the only one of four older sisters not yet married off, she was supervising her twenty-year-old youngest sister Susie’s entrance into society and paying visits to their mentally unstable mother in nearby Brookline. Cary’s letter reached Margaret in early March 1845 at Horace Greeley’s ramshackle rented mansion on Turtle Bay—where 49th Street would one day end at the rocky banks of the East River—and brought with it the chill of New England, or of a friend suffering abandonment.
“The style troubles me very much,” Cary complained of the book, which reads “as if you had gathered flowers and planted them in a garden but had left the roots in their own soil.” The volume was “full of suggestions,” she granted, “but one living child is worth a whole series of tableaux. It is not a book to take to heart and that is what a book upon women should be.” Cary’s blunt criticism was not hard to interpret. The success of Woman in the Nineteenth Century represented Margaret’s New York City flowering, but where were her roots? At ages twenty-six and thirty-four, both Cary and Margaret inwardly sorrowed over their lack of “one living child” while their sisters had taken infants to breast. And, capricious as Cary was in her affections for Margaret, she missed her former teacher, and more than ever wished Margaret might take her to heart. Shortly after they’d parted in the fall, Cary had written Margaret a rare letter of distress, confiding that her mother had slipped into one of her “trances,” pacing the darkened rooms of her Brookline home, “her gaze bent upon the floor as if fixed there by all the swords that ever fought in Jerusalem.” And, frighteningly, “She depends upon me more than upon any-one.”
“It makes me sad that it is necessary such [a book] should be written,” Cary added now in her letter to Margaret, searching for some way to retrieve the situation and offer praise, “but since it is so[,] it cannot but do good to lift the veil as you have done.” Still, Margaret was stung, writing to her brother Richard, “I have found the stranger more sympathizing and . . . intelligent than some of my private friends.” But the weeks spent with Cary in June and October had helped Margaret to forgive her younger friend for having captured Waldo’s fancy, for the material advantages that had seemed like liberty. For the “first time,” Margaret admitted in her diary, she could understand Cary’s “position”: “What a paradise is my degree of freedom compared with her life.” Eventually Cary would be constrained to marry a man who was not Waldo, or Ellery Channing, or William Clarke—or, if she remained single, to continue serving in the “prison” of Captain Sturgis’s several homes as an “auxiliary” to her mother and sisters, perhaps not despised, but nonetheless consigned to a life that could not be characterized as less than “beautiful, powerful, in a word, complete.” No amount of visits to or from Waldo Emerson, whose appearances at Summer Street Cary faithfully reported to Margaret, would make a difference.
Margaret simply chose to overlook Cary’s churlishness. Her own life was moving forward too rapidly to pause for recriminations. Margaret’s need to earn a living, that ceaseless burden, had finally turned blessing. She’d known, since the day she rose from Timothy’s bed in Groton, that her father’s death had meant her life, his end her beginning—the ouroboros. Not only did she sign her second book, into which she had put “a good deal of my true life,” with her true name, S. Margaret Fuller, she also marked it with her emblem. And she would retain the star, in the form of an asterisk, as byline for the front-page New-York Tribune articles she began to write as soon as she’d delivered the manuscript of Woman in the Nineteenth Century to Horace Greeley’s pressmen, ensuring that her own column would be distinguished from Greeley’s unsigned editorials.
Choosing to work as a journalist for a prominent New York City daily was scarcely less ambitious for an American woman in the nineteenth century than becoming a sea captain. Although in her book Margaret had proposed that women serve as “the best helpers of one another,” she had accepted a job that made her the lone female in an office of streetwise newspapermen in the Great Metropolis—for so the city was beginning to be known in 1845—which must have seemed, after “demure Boston,” like a roiling sea of humanity. While Margaret had an enlightened supporter in her employer, she might have done well to heed the skeptical response of Eliza Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne’s mother, to Woman in the Nineteenth Century—if she’d heard it. Unlike her daughter, Mrs. Peabody didn’t object to Margaret’s critique of marriage; rather, she thought Margaret too optimistic. As long as man “has the physical power, as well as the conventional” to treat a woman “like a play-thing or a slave,” she’d written portentously to Sophia, “woman must wait until the lion shall lie down with the lamb, before she can hope to be the friend and companion of man.”
15
“Flying on the paper wings of every day”
THE MID-MARCH DAY WAS “DULL AND DUBIOUS,” THE SKY “leaden and lowering,” the birds silent in the chill air that had brought a swift end that morning to one of New York’s unseasonable warm spells. But the dour weather seemed “suitable” for the outing, a visit to the “pauper establishments”: first the old Bellevue Alms House on the outer limits of the city, on the East River at the foot of 26th Street, and then, by open boat to Blackwell’s Island, a quarter-mile offshore, for tours of the recently constructed Farm School for orphans, the Asylum for the Insane, and the massive crenellated fortress of the Penitentiary, filled already with twelve hundred inmates. All four were institutions that “admonish us of stern realities,” the chill winds of misfortune that could so readily effect the “blight of Nature’s bloom,” Margaret would write in “Our City Charities,” her most comprehensive front-page Tribune editorial to date on societal ills.
These and other similar establishments she had visited since beginning to write for the Tribune in December—the privately run Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in rural upper Manhattan, the dank overcrowded jail in the heart of the city known as the “Tombs”—“should be looked at by all,” Margaret instructed, repeating the imperative twice in her opening paragraph. She urged her readers not to “sink listlessly into selfish ease,” now that the city had completed the three facilities on former pastureland on Blackwell’s Island—the paupers’ new Arcadia. The ambitious building plan was part of a wave of publicly funded social reforms that had swept the young nation since the establishment of the Worcester State Lunatic Hospital in Massachusetts a decade earlier in 1833, an initiative that had gathered the impoverished mentally ill from local jails across the commonwealth, where they were normally held alongside convicted criminals, and provided them with medical treatment in healthful surroundings at the centrally located hospital. As the population of needy citizens, criminals, and other outcasts swelled in big cities, the notion of providing enlightened care and remediation took hold elsewhere, and by 1845 few would have disagreed with Margaret’s statement that “parsimony” was “the worst prodigality” when it came to the treatment of the poor man or the prisoner—though just what should be done inside the new buildings continued to be a matter of debate.
Margaret argued that New Yorkers should play an active role as visitors, both to monitor progress and, more important, to extend a representative hand of care to the inmates so that their benefactors’ “intelligent sympathy” would be felt directly.
The “acceptance of public charity,” she wrote, can be “injurious” to the recipient in an atmosphere devoid of human kindness. “Men treated with respect are reminded of self-respect” was the reform doctrine Margaret preached, allying herself with progressives like Eliza Farnham, the matron at Sing Sing who had the female prisoners under her care keeping journals, tending gardens, and rehearsing for choral concerts.
Yet Margaret knew that few of her readers would heed her advice and follow the route she took on that dreary March day. Few would witness the “vagrant, degraded air” of the men residing in the Alms House, who lacked any employment “except to raise vegetables for the establishment, and prepare clothing for themselves.” There were no books, no classes, no opportunities to learn a trade, no “openings to a better” way of life. Few would see the young mothers next door in Bellevue Hospital exposed to the “careless scrutiny of male visitors” as they nursed their newborns and echo Margaret’s plea to allow them privacy. Few would be greeted on entry to the hospital yard by the little Dutch girl, a misshapen dwarf child abandoned in the city by “some showman,” or notice, along with Margaret, how the poor “gnome” ran expectantly to the gate every time it was opened to search the face of each new visitor.
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