To Waldo, who quickly gleaned that Margaret was “in a sort of beatitude of rest after years of hurry,” as he wrote to Lidian from Manchester, England, where he’d journeyed in November after all, having received a guarantee of satisfactory lecture fees, Margaret described her plans for a winter “quite by myself”: “I shall make no acquaintance from whom I do not hope a good deal, as my time will be like pure gold to me . . . and, just for happiness, Rome itself is sufficient.” She painted the scene of the day on which she’d written, which was “the last of the October feasts of the Trasteverini,” residents of the ancient riverside quarter near St. Peter’s: “I have been, this afternoon, to see them dancing. This morning I was out, with half Rome, to see the Civic Guard manoeuvring in that great field near the tomb of Cecilia Metella, which is full of ruins. The effect was noble, as the band played the Bolognese march, and six thousand Romans passed in battle array amid these fragments of the great time.”
She was “in a state of unnatural divorce,” she was “mingled in the bonds of love,” she was “alone and free”—all were possible now that Margaret was in “a full communion with the spirit of Rome,” the multifarious city with its boisterous Trasteverini, who danced a saltarello that “heated” Margaret with enthusiasm and “carried me quite beyond myself” in “wickedly stolen” moments; with its seductive allegory of Sacred and Profane Love hanging in the Villa Borghese, Titian’s painting of two strikingly beautiful women seated by a well, one fully clothed, the other nude, that “has developed my powers of gazing to an extent unknown before”; and with its massive, manly marble Moses, Michelangelo’s sculpture lodged in the basilica of San Pietro in Vincolo (St. Peter in Chains), “the only thing in Europe, so far, which has entirely outgone my hopes.” It was not quite true, as Margaret had written to William Channing, that “art is not important to me now.” Loving and being loved by Giovanni Ossoli, soon to be commissioned a sergeant in the newly mustered Civic Guard—the spirit of Rome—had intensified all sensory experience, the aspect of Italy, of life itself, as Mickiewicz had tried to tell her, that she could never learn from books.
In the end, the decision had not been painful—“one hates pain in Italy.” There was no need for decision. The most Margaret would ever say in explanation, and this came some years later, was “I acted upon a strong impulse. I could not analyze what happened in my mind.” But yielding to impulse did not mean abandoning principle. “I acted out my character,” she would assert, borrowing the phrase she had used to approve George Sand’s affairs. In discussions with Waldo Emerson years before, Margaret had made up her mind that marriage was a “corrupt social contract” that cheated wife far worse than husband. The question she had needed to resolve was not about loving a man outside the protective bonds of marriage, but about giving up her virginity, altering her view of chastity: that emblem of virtuous womanhood, of personal integrity, as she had long believed; the “lonely position” often chosen by “saints and geniuses,” female and male, as she’d written in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in order to leave themselves “undisturbed by the pressure of near ties.”
Yet even this she had begun to doubt as early as her first encounters with the prostitutes imprisoned at Sing Sing. Margaret had asked Georgiana Bruce, her Brook Farm acolyte, how she thought prostitutes “viewed the whole concept of chastity.” “Do they see any reality in it”? Or did they “look on it merely as a circumstance of condition, like the possession of fine clothes?” Margaret knew that “novelists are fond of representing” prostitutes “as if they looked up to their more protected sisters as saints and angels!” But Margaret had become a journalist, not a novelist, whose trademark was experiencing reality firsthand and recording the truth as she saw it. In Rome, in the fall of 1847, she chose as her icon not a saint or a genius, but Poesy, whose Greek name she knew was Erato, the muse of lyric and love poets. Margaret bought Cary a copy of the Raphael print as a wedding gift to hang over her marriage bed. “The union of two natures for a time is so great,” Margaret wrote to Cary Sturgis Tappan, hinting that she too possessed new carnal knowledge.
Margaret had never forgotten the lines she copied from Sam Ward’s letter into her journal. She did wish to discover “the existence of a new, vast, and tumultuous class of human emotions”—the physical passions. She would not be left behind with “those who have never passed the line” that divided the “more experienced” from those whose “personal experience of passion . . . remain[s] comparatively undeveloped.” “Had I never connected myself with any one,” Margaret understood, “my development must have been partial.” Her “thoughts of consecration,” of a modern-day vestal virginity, which once seemed “true to the time,” she now recognized as “false to the whole.” After meeting Pauline Roland and George Sand in Paris, and in Rome this fall the “energetic and beneficent” Princess Belgioioso, another returned political exile—“a woman of gallantry” who “also has had several lovers, no doubt,” she wrote offhandedly to her increasingly perplexed brother Richard—Margaret could think of no reason not to join their number. Sam Ward’s words and her own thoughts now ran parallel to the “Polander’s” advice: “The relationships which suit you are those which develop and free your spirit, responding to the legitimate needs of your organism . . . You are the sole judge of these needs.”
But why choose to enter into “earthly union,” as she termed sexual intercourse, with Giovanni Ossoli—a young Italian “nothing”—in Rome, and not with the German Jewish banker James Nathan in New York who serenaded her with lieder, or the eminent Adam Mickiewicz in Paris whose fervent attentions had caused her to swoon? “I wanted to forget myself in Italy,” Margaret would later write. Forget how ill prepared she had been to meet James Nathan’s advance, how painfully she’d suffered from disappointed hopes of men with whom she’d envisioned forming the “sacred” relation she had extolled as the highest form of marriage. Forget her aim to fill an “apostolic station” as the chaste high priestess of reform—never yielding to passion, “pure from even the suspicion of error.” Forget even Mickiewicz’s directive: “Live and act, as you write.”
Giovanni Ossoli barely knew her, and he could not read the thousands of English words she’d written in books and newspapers and literary journals. In his love there could be no “mixture of fancy and enthusiasm excited by my talent” to confuse or taint his affections, as there had been with the duplicitous James Nathan. He felt, and showed Margaret with his tender “acts, not words,” a “simple affinity.” He had no expectations of her: “he loves to be with me.” That was all, and for now that was balm and “inestimable blessing.”
Margaret had seen enough of the “great faults” in men “of enthusiasm and genius.” By contrast, Giovanni’s “unspoiled instincts, affections pure and constant,” were “of highest value.” He was a man “wholly without vanity,” without “the slightest tinge of self-love,” qualities Margaret may never have found in a man of equal ambition or with genius comparable to her own. He was as far as possible from the type of man she had always fallen for, had once described in the fictional “Sylvain”—heedless of the “secret riches,” the interior life of the woman he professed to love.
Giovanni Ossoli, as Margaret came to know, was nearly solitary, self-sufficient in a more authentic way than Waldo Emerson, with his talk of escaping from parlors, hiding in woods. In this Giovanni was “very unlike most Italians, but very unlike most Americans too,” Margaret thought. His “affections are few but profound” and “thoroughly acted out”; he withheld nothing he could give to his sister, to his ailing father, to Margaret. His bond with his mother, “lost” when he was “very small”—six years old—was still powerful: “It has been a life-long want with him.” These were the few to whom he found himself “spontaneously bound.”
Perhaps his spontaneous move to rescue Margaret in St. Peter’s, appearing at her elbow as she searched, flustered and anxious, had taken her breath away; certainly she felt with Giovanni, now, as if “some
thing of the violet,” in her private language of flowers a term for sweet seclusion, had “been breathed into my life”—inspired, as Apollo breathed his prophecy to the sibyl—“and will never pass away.” Perhaps they both needed rescue: Margaret, lost from her traveling companions, Ossoli soon to lose his father. Margaret, a maternal thirty-seven, and Giovanni ten years younger, a boy of Rome, established a “mutual tenderness.” No one, “except little children or mother, ever loved me as genuinely as he does,” Margaret would say.
Besides, Margaret was “alone and free” in Rome. After all she’d done to gain what was more “precious” even than Giovanni’s love—“the liberty of single life”—she had no interest in entering on the “jog-trot” of domesticity, with its “trifling business arrangements and various soporifics.” She liked ordering her own days, seeing friends, and Giovanni, only when she chose: “I liked to see those I loved only in the best way.” It was Giovanni who had wanted to marry, not Margaret. Perhaps she had to instruct him on her Fourierist views, her Mickiewiczian “manly sentiments”; their “tie” was not meant to bind, to be “permanent and full,” should leave them both “mentally free” to form and maintain other connections. It would not be fair to hold Giovanni, so much the younger—“all human affections are frail, and I have experienced too great revulsions in my own not to know it.” For her part, “the time was gone by when I could more than prefer any man.” Margaret no longer looked to one man to satisfy her “need of manifold being,” to suit her in more than “a part of my life.” And she was glad to see that “when I am occupied” with the American expatriate artists she entertained on Monday evenings, with “no refreshment” but a brightly lit room full of fresh flowers, when she accepted invitations from Princess Belgioioso and others who “highly prize my intelligent sympathy,” he “is happy in himself.”
Yet this fall, both were happiest when together. “I have not been so well since I was a child, nor so happy ever,” she wrote to her mother of her first six weeks in Rome, though she would not tell her why. She was not sure “how I can ever be willing to live anywhere else.” In her Italian journal, Margaret had recorded her “first acquaintance with the fig and olive,” tasted as she traveled from Naples to Rome in early spring of 1847. She did not record her first experience of “earthly union” with Giovanni Ossoli—where it took place, when, or how she felt.
Perhaps, although he was so much younger, Giovanni was more experienced than she, had already “crossed the line.” He could guide her through any awkwardness, make her feel, with sure motions, beautiful, loved. Or perhaps the “pious” Catholic youth, with a strong “habitual attachment” to the “Roman ritual,” crossed the line with her, and together they experienced “new, vast, and tumultuous” passions for the first time. The lean, lithe, dark-haired, mustachioed sergeant in the Civic Guard was “gentle,” “tender,” “sweet,” “exceedingly delicate.” These were words she used to describe his character—and his touch? He “loves . . . to serve and soothe me.” Did the shade of melancholy in his eyes vanish when he looked into hers?
Whatever else Margaret might say, or not say, afterward, she had chosen Giovanni for pleasure, the most radical act of her life so far. This too delighted her—to find that “I am no longer young, yet still so often new and surprizing to myself.” Her life in “books and reveries” had not been wrong, had trained her spirit, her mind, her heart to achieve intensities of feeling that now could be matched and amplified by bodily sensation. She had postponed this pleasure so long, developed so keenly her emotions, believed so powerfully in the science of “supersensual” forces, how could she have experienced anything less than “full communion” in her lovemaking with Giovanni Ossoli—“transcendent, both spirit and body”—in this city of the “indolently joyous”?
And there was “this fantastic luxury of incognito,” the thrilling yet strangely calming need to keep their love a secret. Giovanni could not openly court a woman who was not a Catholic, and Margaret could not afford the scandal that would come with discovery. She might choose to conduct herself as “one of the emancipated” women of Europe—George Sand, Princess Belgioioso—but she was still an American, and the readers her career depended on would judge her by American standards. Secrecy heightened passion—“I liked when no one knew of our relation, and we passed our days together in the mountains, or walked beautiful nights amid the ruins of Rome.” These were the “blessed, quiet days, when I could yield myself to be soothed and instructed by the great thoughts and memories of the place,” as she wrote obliquely to Waldo Emerson. The first “intoxicated” months of her affair with Giovanni Ossoli felt “like retiring to one of those gentle, lovely places in the woods” —“I should have wished to remain as we were.”
“I now really live in Rome,” Margaret announced in a Tribune column written the day after she’d reported her six weeks of good health to her mother, “and I begin to see and feel the real Rome.” The city “reveals herself now; she tells me some of her life.” Margaret described her habit of making daily excursions to no particular destination, always finding “some object of consummate interest to end a walk.” Although it was mid-December, nearly the winter solstice, the evenings seemed long, and “I am at leisure to follow up the inquiries suggested by the day.” She threw herself into a “nightly fever” of writing, she told one friend, after long days in which “I dissipate my thoughts on outward beauty . . . happiest moments.”
In the Tribune column Margaret described one of those walks, taken in early November during the Octave of the Dead, the week following All Souls’ Day. Giovanni was with her—“my attendant,” as she discreetly referred to her lover—and they had crossed the Tiber to take the road up the Janiculum hill above St. Peter’s to the Santo Spirito Cemetery, joining other pilgrims in ritual mourning. Their route was lined with “professional beggars” playing on the sympathy of the crowd, and Margaret could not help laughing at some of their tricks, “to the alarm of my attendant, who declared they would kill me, if ever they caught me alone.” But “I was not afraid.” Her mood changed when they entered the cemetery, “a sweet, tranquil place, lined with cypresses, and soft sunshine lying on the stone coverings.” In a courtyard painted with murals depicting the stations of the cross, they watched as a Franciscan monk, a pregnant woman “uttering, doubtless, some tender aspiration for the welfare of the yet unborn dear one,” and a cluster of chanting boys took turns kneeling to pray before the series of images marking each stage in “the Passion of Jesus.”
Margaret knew that her American readers, mainly Protestants, would find the scene barbaric—worship before painted idols! Margaret herself felt “my own removal” from their “forms” of belief was “wide as pole from pole.” On her travels through Europe, she had been exposed to the deeply held religious convictions of revolutionaries like Mazzini and Mickiewicz, reared in the Catholic Church, who fused their native faith with radicalism: “noble exiles, pining for their natural sphere; many of [whom] seek in Jesus the guide and friend.” Margaret had not been influenced to alter her private belief in a pervasive, all-suffusing, ever-rejuvenating “Creative Spirit.” But that day, among the kneeling Romans, “their spirit touched me,” and she joined them:
I prayed too—prayed for the distant, every way distant—for those who seem to have forgotten me, and with me all we had in common—prayed for the dead in spirit, if not in body—prayed for myself, that I might never walk the earth
‘The tomb of my dead self,’
and prayed in general for all unspoiled and loving hearts, no less for all who suffer and find yet no helper.
Then she rose and walked with Giovanni to the top of the Janiculum, where “before me lay Rome,” a broad expanse of tiled roofs and cupolas, stucco walls and glowing domes, with the broad oaks of the Borghese gardens in the distance, “how exquisitely tranquil in the sunset!”
The Tribune account contained a coded message for anyone who knew the poems of Shelley as Margaret did. She had quote
d from “The Sunset,” a love poem that told of the “night [a] youth and lady mingled lay / In love and sleep”:
. . . None may know
The sweetness of the joy which made his breath
Fail, like the trances of the summer air,
When, with the Lady of his love, who then
First knew the unreserve of mingled being . . .
Like the lovers in Shelley’s lyric, Giovanni and Margaret had wandered a wooded hillside, watched a glorious sunset, and, a knowing reader might infer, spent a night together. In the poem, the lady wakes to find her young lover dead beside her, leaving her to a lifetime of mourning, to walk the earth as “the tomb of thy dead self”—the line Margaret adapted for her Tribune column. New to the blissful “unreserve of mingled being,” Margaret had prayed that November afternoon, among kneeling pilgrims communing with their dead, that this would not be her fate—that her “Vita Nuovissima” would last. For the moment, with “unspoiled and loving” Giovanni Ossoli at her side, she “was not afraid.”
Margaret Fuller Page 37