Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  During Margaret’s first months on the job, Ellery Channing was often on hand as one of the scribbling men in shirtsleeves at the other writing tables. But by April, Greeley had discovered Ellery’s inability “to make his own work,” and Margaret’s brother-in-law was fired. She was angry at Ellery for wasting the opportunity, but she was also relieved. His presence, reminding her of the old family obligations, had put a crimp in the freedom she’d anticipated in choosing to pursue a profession in New York. She welcomed the excuse to travel into the city and follow her own whims, whether to attend concerts or lectures in the evening or to visit the houses of friends like Maria Child, on Third Street in Greenwich Village, or to the literary salon in the home of Anne Charlotte Lynch, on Waverly Place at Washington Square.

  The success of Woman in the Nineteenth Century made Margaret a celebrity even at Waverly Place, at these regular Saturday-evening gatherings of New York’s elite writers and editors—Poe, Sedgwick, Duyckinck, O’Sullivan—where the admiring Elizabeth Oakes Smith noticed that, in the overfull rooms, Margaret’s “fine head and spiritual expression at once marked her out from the crowd.” Anne Lynch’s soiree held the Saturday after St. Valentine’s Day in 1845 made the newspaper, with Margaret depicted sitting at table, “her large gray eyes lamping inspiration and her thin quivering lip prophesying like a Pythoness.” Shortly after, Poe’s Broadway Journal ran an unflattering review of Margaret’s book, accompanied by an even less flattering cartoon, captioned “Portrait of a Distinguished Authoress,” featuring a haughty, mannish, ringleted creature at her writing desk, holding a book and peering at it nearsightedly. Misogynist envy jostled with sisterly admiration for Margaret among New York’s literati.

  Margaret, who found the Lynch salon “not pleasant” and inclined toward the transmission of “second hand literary gossip,” had already spent that same Valentine’s Day—the “merry season of light jokes and lighter love-tokens,” as she observed in her Tribune report—touring the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, then under the enlightened supervision of the Paris-trained physician Pliny Earle. The dancing party held on a Friday evening for the patients, so differently cared for than the cowering inmates Margaret would later encounter on Blackwell’s Island, demonstrated that “even those who are troublesome and subject to violent excitement” had “the power of self-control” if given “an impulse strong enough” and “favorable circumstances.” While one member of Margaret’s touring group remarked “how very little our partialities, undue emotions, and manias need to be exaggerated to entitle us to rank among madmen,” Margaret took an opposite view in concluding her Tribune account: “that, with all our faults and follies, there is still a sound spot, a presentiment of eventual health in the inmost nature.” The excursion to Bloomingdale had “embolden[ed]” her “to hope—to know it is the same with all.” That hope surely extended to her youngest brother, Lloyd, the sibling for whom she still felt most responsibility in her newly carefree New York days. The nineteen-year-old’s “partial inferiority,” as she now described Lloyd’s mental disability, had so far prevented him from learning a trade or settling into a stable living arrangement. Yet Margaret continued to find him situations—as a boarding student at Brook Farm, as a clerk in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore—always expecting to locate that “sound spot” in her brother’s troubled nature.

  This season Margaret’s personal “presentiment of eventual health” derived from her acquaintance with another doctor in the city whose skills had been developed in France, a native Frenchman named Theodore Leger, who practiced the “supersensual” science of mesmerism in an office near the Tribune building. The troubles Margaret sought help for were more physical than psychic, “material” rather than “spiritual,” by the terms of a book she reviewed in the Tribune the week before her visit to Bloomingdale—Etherology; or, The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology. Margaret had long suffered from pain and fatigue caused by spinal curvature—the lazy “S” that supported her back, leaving one shoulder lower than the other and contributing to the awkward “swanlike” (or pythonesque) extension of her neck so often noted in physical descriptions. She customarily wore a horsehair shoulder pad inside her dress to compensate for her uneven posture. But no matter how well the trick worked in social settings, Margaret’s weak, ill-formed spine added to the shameful sense of homeliness she’d felt all her life in comparison to her pretty mother and sister, and that had overcome her the year before in springtime when she’d felt burdened by “this ugly cumbrous mass of flesh.” She’d hated “not to be beautiful, when all around is so”—when William Clarke was so evidently not in love with her. If there was “a prospect of cure” she would “do almost any thing to ensure it,” Margaret wrote to her friend Rebecca Spring’s husband, Marcus, who knew Dr. Leger and offered an introduction. Nothing “that could now happen” would “make me so happy.”

  Mesmeric healing—Dr. Leger’s science, or art—operated on the principle that there was a connection between the spiritual and the material and, further, that properties of mind could penetrate physical boundaries to effect cures. At a time when new discoveries about electricity and chemistry, invisible forces with properties that could be proved empirically, were altering the “rule of life,” as Margaret wrote in her review of Etherology, showing that “old limits become fluid beneath the fire of thought,” the probability that there existed an ethereal “means by which influence and thought may be communicated from one being to another, independent of the usual organs, and with a completeness and precision rarely attained through these,” seemed plausible even to a habitual skeptic like Margaret. And she had long harbored a fancy that women were particularly receptive to such “magnetic” influences, as they were also called. Woman’s “intuitions,” she’d noted in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, “are more rapid and more correct”; surely this pointed to the predominance of the “electrical, the magnetic element in Woman.” Although, as Margaret would write in a later review, “we do not yet know the origin, or even clearly the features” of the medium, and “patience and exactness in experiment” would be required to discover and prove them, she nevertheless believed that “victories in the realm of the mind” were inevitable. Within fifty years, Margaret predicted, there would be “more rapid and complete modes of intercourse between mind and mind.”

  Margaret considered herself “free from prejudice” on the subject of mesmeric healing, though not precisely an advocate, and was well aware of the many quack physicians preying on the credulous public. But she had heard persuasive accounts of Dr. Leger’s “decisive cures.” At her first appointment she received so much “entertainment” from the “insouciant robust Frenchman,” who chatted through the twenty-minute treatment about his adventures during a ten-year stint as professor at a medical college in Mexico, that she began to visit him almost daily on her way to work. Margaret experienced “no sleep, no trance,” she wrote to Cary Sturgis, but the “accessions of strength” she received from Dr. Leger’s “local action on the distended bones is obvious.” According to reports from friends who saw Margaret that spring, her posture improved markedly. By one account, her spine gained two to four inches over five months of treatment, and she was able to abandon her shoulder pad. In pleasant weather now, she walked the four miles to work, all the way from Turtle Bay to City Hall Park.

  The process was certainly magical, if not actually magnetic. According to Georgiana Bruce, who attended one of the sessions, Margaret sat on a stool with the back of her dress unbuttoned while the doctor, standing behind her, “held his right hand horizontally, close against the vertebral column, the fingers pointing towards but never touching it. Slowly he moved his hand from the very end of the spine to the base of the brain, charging it with his vigorous magnetism. There was a slight trembling of his arm as he willed that power should flow from him to the patient.” Afterward, Margaret told Georgiana that Dr. Leger’s ministrations were so forceful it had felt “like having a rod of iron worked into her poor spine.
”

  In a review of Leger’s own book, Animal Magnetism, published the year after the treatments were completed, Margaret added her personal impressions to a favorable assessment of his text: the French doctor had “a power of transmitting vital energy to those who need soothing or strengthening.” In the spring of 1845, Margaret explained tantalizingly to Cary Sturgis, “what I meet at the Mesmeric apartments affords a new view of life.”

  Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore.” But Margaret’s awareness of this “confused idea” didn’t stop her from falling in love with such a man herself the same winter that her book appeared in print. Her canny insight did not help her to recognize what was happening as she found herself in thrall to a man of just her own age, dark-haired and blue-eyed, a German Jewish banker with literary aspirations who sang and played the guitar and had already made his fortune in the big city, planning to retire soon to his native Germany after traveling in Italy and Egypt—but who also, as Margaret would learn after she’d already let herself believe theirs might become “a truly happy intercourse,” kept a mistress in his downtown Manhattan rooms.

  Margaret met James Nathan, a textile wholesaler turned Wall Street banker, at Anne Lynch’s New Year’s Eve party, just as she’d issued her Tribune editorial heralding “the new knowledge, the new thought, the new hope . . . of a better day.” Nathan himself later claimed, building up his connection with the famous newspaper editor, that the meeting had taken place at the Greeleys’ home in Turtle Bay. Perhaps to exonerate himself, James Nathan—who by then had changed his name to James Gotendorf—preferred to place their first meeting in a tamer setting than the unchaperoned soiree. Or perhaps his fuzzy memory retrieved an emotional truth, that all along his chief aim had been to reach Horace Greeley through Margaret. This was to be the only wish consummated by either of the two: near the end of an affair that played out inconclusively over more than a year, Margaret finally persuaded her employer to publish a half-dozen of her “beloved” James Nathan’s travel letters, heavily edited by herself, in the Tribune.

  Such was the progress of the “nameless relation,” as Margaret would defensively label her tumultuous romance with James Nathan, “which cannot be violated and may grow to what it will.” Incongruent desires ran on parallel tracks, which Margaret persisted in hoping might one day bear the couple on a shared journey, the “religious” union “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine” that she had described in Woman in the Nineteenth Century as the highest form of marriage. It was not to be. Still, the connection advanced well beyond any Margaret had previously experienced with a man. Margaret was now a woman of certifiable influence in the Great Metropolis, a woman from whom James Nathan believed he could gain something; he would not readily sever the tie.

  And James Nathan was no Puritan of Concord, no child-man of the near West. A self-made man of the world, who had arrived penniless in New York fifteen years before and was about to leave it as a man of leisure, James Nathan must have taken Margaret for a woman cast in the mold of her publicly avowed models, Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand: women “rich in genius” and “of most tender sympathies” who, “in breaking bonds,” had knowingly “become outlaws,” as he read in the copy of Woman in the Nineteenth Century that Margaret gave him as an early token of her affection.

  Their first private rendezvous, a month after the meeting at Anne Lynch’s party, took them to exhibition rooms for a viewing of a panoramic painting of Jerusalem. Margaret had proposed to James Nathan by letter that “some day when you are not bound to buying and selling, and I, too, am free . . . you will perhaps take me from Dr. Leger’s in the morning, and show me some one of those beautiful places which I do not yet know.” After receiving an invitation so enticingly phrased, so clearly designed to draw them both into a covert alliance initiated on the French doctor’s doorstep, could James Nathan be blamed for not taking to heart a different line from Woman in the Nineteenth Century, one that expressed more accurately Margaret’s private views on romance—“the utmost ardor is coincident with the utmost purity”?

  The same week that he received Margaret’s suggestive invitation, James Nathan would have read in the Tribune her further biographical remarks on George Sand, who, Margaret argued in her essay “French Novelists of the Day,” should be “prized . . . both as a warning and a leader.” Sand, Margaret wrote, had “not only broken the marriage bond,” but “since that, [had] formed other connections independent of the civil or ecclesiastical sanction”; “loudly called by passion: she yielded.” James Nathan could have easily—or willfully—overlooked Margaret’s corollary judgment of Sand, her “warning” that if only this woman of “genius,” so “free” and “bold,” had held herself “pure from even the suspicion of error”—had not yielded to sexual passion—then she might have become more than a “leader”; she “might have filled an apostolic station among her people.”

  At the close of the essay, Margaret printed two sonnets by the English poet Elizabeth Barrett addressed to George Sand, “A Desire” and “A Recognition.” Would it have changed Margaret’s response to James Nathan’s overtures in the coming months if she had known that in London, this same spring of 1845, Barrett was being courted in secret by the younger, lesser-known Robert Browning, with whom she would elope to Italy in defiance of her father? Or would Margaret even then have held herself to an exacting standard of purity, explaining to James Nathan, in rebuffing his advances, her belief that “there are . . . in every age a few in whose lot the meaning of that age is concentrated”? “I feel that I am one of those persons in my age and sex,” she told him. “I feel chosen among women.” Margaret would preserve her right to fill an apostolic station, if called. Or, at least, her declaration revealed the extremity of self-justification she had reached in arguing the merits of chaste love with a man of “boldness, simplicity and fervor” to whom, she readily admitted, she had “felt a strong attraction . . . since we first met.”

  In the beginning there were outings to concerts and lectures, to which Margaret had free entry as a reviewer, arranged in person following her “soothing and strengthening” sessions with Dr. Leger, or with notes conveyed by errand boys running between their two offices. Eventually Margaret won Mary Greeley’s permission for James Nathan to visit her at Turtle Bay, where he brought his guitar and entertained both women with German lieder on days when Horace stayed late at the office. Later he brought his dog, Josey, an enormous male Newfoundland whose rambles provided convenient cover for Margaret and her gentleman caller to tramp the rocky shoreline of the East River together. She permitted James Nathan to take her in his arms and lift her across fences, to sit with her alone on the bank in the moonlight.

  Over these days, although James Nathan warned Margaret she might “never know” him “wholly” and seemed reluctant to respond to Margaret’s “wish to hear more” of his “life and position,” Margaret felt certain she had “seen [his] inmost heart” and would never “misunderstand what is deepest” in him. She loved this man whose first language was Goethe’s: an exotic Jew, perhaps the first she had met, who could “show me how the sun of to-day shines upon the ancient Temple” even as he squired her to Sunday services at William Channing’s Society of Christian Union, a man with whom she never felt “restless sad or weary.” And as they talked, James Nathan listening more than he spoke, Margaret felt loved by him, as if “my mind has been enfolded in your thought as a branch with flame.”

  Suddenly, “twenty four hours are a great many,” she complained, when a full day passed without seeing “my dear friend” or receiving a letter from him, without being able to confide “these little thi
ngs”—the jubilant songbirds she heard outside her bedroom window at Turtle Bay, called forth by “the sunshine of this beautiful world.” To a former student, Anna Loring, in Boston, Margaret wrote obliquely that despite the sorrows of “last Winter’s frost” and her vow “to wean myself from . . . close habits of personal relations”—“still hopes will spring up.” Margaret now felt “exceedingly happy, really like the Spring.” Dr. Leger’s magnetic magic, James Nathan’s enfolding arms and enflaming mental embrace, had squared her shoulders, made her feel part of “this beautiful world.” To James Nathan she confided that on days such as those they spent together at Turtle Bay, “one feels at home on the earth.” She could not believe her new hopes would “suffer an untimely blight.”

  But her revelatory intuition that “there is to be so quick a bound to intercourse,” as she announced in a letter to James Nathan, was really not so new for Margaret. She had entertained premonitions of deep connections rapidly formed with George Davis, Sam Ward, William Clarke. What was new was the rumor she heard near the end of March from the proprietress of a boarding house in his neighborhood: James Nathan had a young woman living with him in his apartments. When confronted, he did not deny the charge, only promised a letter of explanation, which Margaret received from his errand boy on the street a day later. With “a cold faintness” she removed the fragrant flowers she had pinned to her dress that morning in an effort to cheer herself, handing them to a blind beggar girl on the corner, almost envying the child “for being in her shut up state less subject to the sudden shocks of feeling,” and opened the letter.