Margaret Fuller (11 page)

Margaret’s longing for George Davis flared in the crisis. He became “a walking memento mori—haunting [my] day-dreams,” she would write to James. In her depression, she thought once again how George Davis had seemed her ideal mate, “the only person who can appreciate my true self.”
In her journal she confided that “there is no person whose companionship would be endurable to me—except one—and reason forbids me even to wish for that person’s society—reason alas! pride too—In a profound but not a cold reserve I must shroud my heart, if I would escape the most deadly wounds.”
She had taken the language of Goethe’s
Sorrows
as her own.

The passions Margaret allowed herself to feel and respond to now were for women. During the past year she had enjoyed climbing the rocks above the harbor at Lynn, ten miles north of Boston, with Elizabeth Randall—“more sweet and lovely than ever and I in highest glee”—nearly as much as James might have, and she regaled him with the story.
The younger Anna Barker, when in town, held Margaret fascinated. Anna was her “divinest love,”
Margaret would write; theirs was “the same love we shall feel when we are angels.”

Just as Margaret had divined the truth about James’s attraction to Elizabeth Randall, James intuited the source of Margaret’s passion for Anna: “how she idolizes you, how happy it must make you to be loved by her so much.”
But even if Anna’s adoration served to soothe Margaret’s wounded heart, “the sympathy, the interest” were not, by any means, all on Anna’s side. “I loved Anna for a time,” Margaret wrote in a later reminiscence, “with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel—Her face was always gleaming before me, her voice was echoing in my ear, all poetic thoughts clustered round the dear image.”
While Margaret’s idealizing passion for Anna resembled her exalted feelings for George Davis, and the two young women sometimes shared a bed at night while visiting each other, the love between them, as James’s reaction shows, would not have provoked gossip or carried the same label—homosexual—as it would a century later. Such same-sex “loves” might be exclusive and rhapsodic, but they did not brand the lovers as outside the norm, as lesbians. The key to Margaret’s ability to feel such a love just now, however, may not have been Anna’s safely tantalizing femininity, but her lengthy absences; as long as Anna remained more “image” than reality, she was no threat to Margaret’s disciplined study.

For it was the friendship with James Clarke, their shared enterprise, that supplied Margaret with all she had missed from George Davis, and without the distracting romantic heat or tussle for dominance. James recognized, as George-Sylvain had not, Margaret’s “secret riches within”—her extensive resources of mind, heart, and soul. He catalogued them in his journal as an extraordinary mix of “sympathies most wide, with reasoning powers most active and unshackled,” and “an understanding that revels in the widest prospects.”
James understood too, as few men ever would, the bind Margaret was in. To have, as he saw it, so clear a “consciousness” of her abilities that she must suffer acute frustration from their lack of outlet was the chief “evil” of life for Margaret: “her powers immeasurably transcend her sphere.”
In his journal James could not help but wonder “what is the effect of these powers. She is not happy—it all ends in nothing . . . she has no sphere of action. Why was she a woman?”
A despairing Margaret asked herself the same question, noting bitterly, with the same astute consciousness Clarke identified, that “men never, in any extreme of despair, wished to be women.”

Perhaps it was because he too was suffering more than heartache that James could summon such empathy for Margaret. At the start of their year of intense German study, he’d been forced to take a year off from divinity school to teach at the Port School in order to raise tuition money; then, partway through his year of teaching, his father died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, with James standing by. His mourning for the impecunious yet goodhearted Samuel Clarke was deepened with the death that same year of the intellectual father he shared with Margaret: Goethe died in Weimar at eighty-two. Unwilling to turn to his grandfather Freeman, who had refused to pay for the second year of his divinity school training, James relied on Margaret as his chief emotional support; she was the one person he could go to “full of self dissatisfaction” and come away “excited & ready to exert myself.”

Margaret was fortunate that the impulses of Romanticism had brought her together with James Clarke; the literature they explored was suffused with emotionality, suffering, and struggle. By their own example, Goethe, Schiller, and the others gave their male readers permission to be more expressive of their feelings and so to understand and accept a woman’s emotions more readily. Although they were not lovers, Margaret and James could still offer each other small gestures of physical comfort. On one occasion, “her kind pressure of my hand when I was in as miserable a mood” had “rejoiced” James, and he offered her the same one day when she had come to him “with tears glistening in her eyes . . . [and] expressed feelings of infinite capacities unsatisfied, powers unemployed & wasting, wants & burning desires unmet.”
Whether Margaret had intended to or not, she had established with James a “limitless confidence” that served them both well.

Yet even James could make a misstep. When he suggested to Margaret, in the fall of 1832, that she solve her problems by becoming a writer—“you are destined to be an author,” he had written; “I shall yet see you wholly against your will and drawn by circumstances, become the founder of an American literature!”
—she was affronted that James “should think me fit for nothing but to write books.” If she were to “fulfil your prediction,” Margaret snapped, “it will be indeed ‘against my will’ and I am sure I shall never be happy.” Her “bias” was not toward writing, as he should have known, but “towards the living and practical.” Although she was always on the lookout for the work of those she considered serious women writers, Margaret had developed an abhorrence for the sentimental novels that seemed a woman’s best route to literary fame; she wrote James that she had little in common with “women authors’ mental history.”

And she was right. What man with similar powers of reasoning and speech would have been advised to confine his ambitions to the printed page? Timothy Fuller had given Margaret a lawyer’s training in rational argument; he’d coached and prodded until she could think on her feet just as well as he could. On her own, she had given herself an education equal to that of the young men around her studying for law or the ministry; in their company she could argue or sermonize on almost any subject as well as or better than all of them. Indeed, James had already sent her a draft of a sermon he was preparing and asked her opinion.
Some years later Margaret would write to James, after hearing an elite roster of Massachusetts statesmen deliver eulogies on the death of Lafayette to an enthusiastic crowd, “I felt as I have so often done before if I were a man decidedly the gift I would choose should be that of eloquence—That power of forcing the vital currents of thousands of human hearts into
one
current.” The power of captivating an audience, however fleeting, attracted her above “a more extensive fame, a more permanent influence” in literature.
The sad truth was, she already had that power, but no way of exercising it.

Rebuffed, but still concerned for his friend, James wrote about Margaret in his journal, “She has nothing to do—no place in the world & fears she never shall have.” Privately he wished she might fall in love with someone more responsive than George Davis and “have someone to reverence.”
Such a love might give her a “sphere of duty,”
if not of “action,” and a man into whom she could transfer her ambitions and see them realized. As much as he loved his friend, he could not imagine for her any other means to happiness than the kind of marriage he looked for—with wife as helpmeet.

If she had known of these thoughts, Margaret would surely have been even more angry than she’d been at James’s suggestion that she become a writer. Guessing that, he withheld them. Yet part of Margaret’s struggle during these months was with this very question. She had an instinct, she would later write, “from a very early age . . . that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn.”
In time she would become convinced that she was not meant to experience “more extended personal relations”
and that “self-dependence,”
as she called it, would have to suffice, making her a lone “pilgrim and sojourner on earth.” Her questing would never end, and she must learn to “be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife.”
But for now, she felt only anxiety about the future.

Margaret’s greatest frustration was to undergo all this while still living as a dependent in her father’s household—subject to his whims about where the family would live, even what she must do each day. Timothy, who she recognized had given her the gift of treating her, when a child, “not as a plaything, but as a living mind,” had nonetheless failed to help her find an outlet for the capabilities he once fostered so avidly.
She began to see that he had made the mistake of so many well-meaning parents who try to make children “conform to an object and standard of their own” rather than help them to “live a new life.”
Now their frustrations mirrored each other’s—neither had yet found a way to be effective in the world, to have their talents appreciated. Timothy had molded Margaret in his own image of frustrated ambition, and that had left her with nothing to do and no place to go, except his home.

Margaret had Timothy’s bullheadedness too, so when he ordered her to go to church on Thanksgiving the year she turned twenty-one, this young woman who had six volumes of the godless Goethe’s complete works in her room, who “always suffered much in church from a feeling of disunion with the hearers and dissent from the preacher,” went only grudgingly, and sat in the family pew feeling a “strange anguish, this dread uncertainty.”
She thought of her “unrecognized” powers, of how “the past was worthless, the future hopeless,” yet “my aspiration seemed very high.” She waited impatiently for the sermon to end so she could escape the confining space, the predictable worship service—“that I might get into the free air.” Church was no place for Margaret, nor for any woman who wished to lead, to be eloquent, to be heard.

She left the church and walked fast, almost running, over the barren fields stretching between Old Cambridge and the Port, her old neighborhood. She found a stream she’d observed in springtime as a rushing torrent, now “voiceless, choked with withered leaves,” yet, she marveled, “it did not quite lose itself in the earth.” She pressed on to a grove of trees surrounding a “pool, dark and silent,” a place that would serve for reflection, for resolution, as the late-afternoon sun shone out “like the last smile of a dying lover.” She stood still, yet her thoughts continued to race, casting her back to childhood, to her earliest awareness of her questing self. She recalled a day, just an ordinary day when “I had stopped myself . . . on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?”

She began to remember “all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned,” how she had struggled “under these limitations of time and space, and human nature” to find the meaning of Margaret Fuller, and was struggling still. The torment, the uncertainty, the “earthly pain at not being recognized” had at last become intolerable. Could Margaret really hold to her vow not to seek “a positive religion, a refuge, a protection”? Not on this day. She looked around at the barren landscape, the reflecting pool, which may have yielded up the very picture of her misery—loose hair, disheveled dress, anxious face, neither pretty nor plain. She was tired of seeking and not finding, asking and not knowing. She wanted to leave her noisy questing “self” behind in that pool—not by tumbling in, like Narcissus, but by rising up. The answer came to her: “I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly . . . that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine.”

Margaret rushed home in the moonlight, stopping to offer a prayer in the churchyard she had fled just hours before, grateful for this epiphany—this “communion with the soul of things”
—grateful to be “taken up into God,” to find her place in “the grand harmony.” She would bid farewell to the “epoch of pride,” move beyond her “haughty, passionate, ambitious”
youth, and follow her father to whatever country village he chose, educate her brothers, inspire her sister, help her mother—and never again allow herself to be “completely engaged in self.” But it was a hedged bet, and deep down she knew it. Give up the self, so that “all” could be
mine.

•  III  •

GROTON AND PROVIDENCE