Margaret Fuller (12 page)

The Fuller farmhouse in Groton as it appeared in 1902, with wings added in the 1890s

The Greene Street School, Providence

7

“My heart has no proper home”

T
HE SQUARE WHITE FARMHOUSE TIMOTHY FULLER PURCHASED
in Groton, from another scion of the prosperous Dana family, was set on a hill at the edge of town, with ample fields for tillage and commanding views of Mount Monadnock and Mount Wachusett from the topmost of its ten spacious rooms. It seemed an ideal retreat to the would-be historian, but not to his daughter. This was the “too tamely smiling and sleepy” New England village with pretensions to nobility where Margaret had suffered through a year at Miss Prescott’s boarding school as a teenager, learning unwanted lessons in humility from her small-minded classmates.
The sense of being a social and intellectual misfit recurred as soon as Margaret began to meet her new neighbors, who, in contrast to her city friends, seemed to her “neither beautiful nor heroick,”
their “characters” so unformed as to hardly be “amusing.”
In the months before the move, Margaret had steeled herself to “live alone, to all intents and purposes,—separate entirely my acting from my thinking world, take care of my ideas without aid.” Now she had arrived, as she’d written to James Clarke, “where there is never a spirit to come, if I call ever so loudly”
—or, as she put it less dramatically to her Cambridge school friend Almira Penniman Barlow, “This is the first time in my life that I have known what it is to have nobody to speak to.”

Groton’s main street was dotted with the elegant homes of Massachusetts men wealthy enough to retire to the country without the necessity of working a farm. The Fullers were different. Once Timothy abandoned his political career and the daily practice of law, his family was left with scant resources, a fact he’d managed to keep from his wife and children as long as they’d boarded with his rich brother Abraham in Cambridge. After the family settled in Groton in the spring of 1833, there could be no more illusions. Timothy Fuller’s income was reduced to the meager rents he could not always manage to collect on the Cherry Street house in Cambridgeport and a few other tumbledown properties—he was no Dana when it came to real estate—along with the occasional legal matter that still took him into Boston, a six-hour trip by stage. Timothy and his sons would have to work the Groton farm by themselves in hopes of turning a profit. Once capable of serving up a lavish feast for Boston’s finest in honor of the president, Timothy now expected his family to subsist on corn, potatoes, pumpkins, and beans from the fields, milk from three dairy cows, and the occasional chicken butchered from the flock. Timothy himself dined almost exclusively on bread and milk, a diet he insisted was as healthful as it was economical, and he urged his family to follow suit.

To avoid the expense of private school tuition, Timothy required Margaret to run a family school for all her siblings, not just the youngest ones. Eugene was in his third year at Harvard, disappointing Timothy and Margaret with his mediocre performance and lack of ambition, despite being, Margaret thought, “a sweet youth”
; sixteen-year-old William Henry, prone to rages—“collisions,”
Margaret called them—against his father, left home to look for office work in Boston almost as soon as he learned of Timothy’s plans to make a farmer of him. That still left thirteen-year-old Ellen, who, with their mother’s winsome looks, missed city life almost as much as Margaret did, and the three boys, Arthur, Richard, and Lloyd, ages eleven, nine, and seven. Always resistant to discipline and beginning to show signs of the erratic behavior that would later blossom into mental illness, Lloyd was nearly hopeless in the classroom. Richard was steadier, but Arthur, the Fuller child who, after Margaret, showed the most intellectual promise, had suffered a serious injury shortly after the move, when a farmhand, soon released from service, clumsily tossed a piece of stove wood in the boy’s direction and hit him in the face. Margaret became her brother’s nurse, spending her first weeks in the country “in a dark room” where Arthur lay in bed “burning with fever”; the boy recovered from infection, but lost the sight in one eye.

The shock of her favorite brother’s injury may not have been the only reason “I greeted my new home with a flood of bitter tears,” as Margaret wrote to Eliza Farrar in Cambridge.
The “
only
grown-up daughter” in the family,
Margaret shared her mother’s burden of household chores, often taking full charge when Margarett Crane, still given to bouts of depression and illness, could not manage. The Fullers occasionally hired a servant to assist with cooking and cleaning, but the family needlework fell to Margaret alone: the “sitting-still occupations,” she called them, of cutting out and sewing new clothes, mending and darning old ones, which all too often left “my spirit faint from inanition.”
When Margaret sat to read or write, she never felt confined, but sewing prevented the mental activity she craved even more than physical freedom. “My fingers have been busy, my eyes wide open but my mind has been so still,” she fretted that first summer in Groton; “my feelings seemed sunk down so deep—I almost believed I should never hope nor fear perhaps never
think
again.”

Margaret’s submerged feelings included alarm at her father’s escalating despotism on the isolated Groton homestead, where there was little to distract or curb his repressive nature. Grandiose plans for the history he had not yet begun to write clashed with his nagging sense of failure in public life, turning Timothy Fuller into a figure Margaret would one day term the “domestic tyrant,” unpredictably liberal or restrictive with his family members, always controlling.
When her brothers Richard and Arthur, initially enchanted by farm life, appealed to their father to let them skip their studies and devote their first Groton summer to field work, Timothy agreed to the bargain—then refused to release them from it once they’d gotten a taste of the “hardening” labor he demanded.
He woke the boys at dawn, berating them if they weren’t out of bed at first call, and saw to it that plowing, planting, and the work of building a new barn on the property continued with little respite through the long hot days. In fact, had the boys not proposed the arrangement, Timothy would likely have forced it on them out of necessity. Yet he never asked more of his sons than of himself, and the sight of their fifty-five-year-old father, whose work had previously been conducted exclusively at a desk or on the floor of a legislative chamber, prostrate for hours after loading grain in the midsummer heat, made as deep an impression on his children as the nature walks he led on the occasional holiday, offering up bits of wisdom to mingle with the birdsong.

Margaret bristled at Timothy’s mixed signals. Not quite ready to see his oldest daughter, the intellectual prodigy he’d nurtured with late-night drills, become a household drudge, Timothy built Margaret a shaded seat at the entrance to a pinewood down the hill, which he dubbed “Margaret’s Grove.” But she refused to go there on her own and never made the time to visit the spot with her father; Timothy could control her workday, but not her few leisure hours. She preferred a stand of trees farther off, on the banks of the Nashua River. She named the spot “Hazel-grove,” and in her few private moments took what solace she could from the nearby mountains.
“I used to look at them,” she later wrote, “towering to the sky, and feel that I, too, from birth, had longed to rise, and, though for the moment crushed, was not subdued.”

Margaret would always question her father’s “ill-judged exchange” of city living for hard country labor, in which mother and children were “violently rent from all their former life and cast on toils for which they were unprepared.”
But certain habits of mind remained, even intensified, for both Timothy and Margaret in rustic isolation. She could not have acknowledged it directly, but Margaret suffered from the same smoldering intellectual drive and frustrated social ambition that consumed her father. Although she was twenty-three and had the skills to earn her independence as a governess or schoolteacher, Margaret did not, like the older Fuller boys, see her future in terms of escape from the family. After years of aiming higher, she knew full well that “some might sneer at the notion of my becoming a teacher.”
She was also reluctant to advertise her family’s—and her own—fall from fortune by taking a job away from home. A profound sense of identification with and a grudging loyalty to the man who had once taken such pride in her genius bound Margaret to her father and fostered a need to serve as her mother’s support and protector. She would not leave.

Groton nights were for study and writing—at first primarily letters. Margaret could dash off more than a dozen at one sitting as she worked to secure her connections with friends who all too often disappointed her when they came to visit. Her life was now so different from theirs. During her first year at Groton, her friend Amelia Greenwood’s engagement “seems to have changed our relation to one another,” Margaret wrote bluntly.
Once married, Amelia was “entirely absorbed”: “All her thoughts now revolve around one centre”—her new husband.
As a nine-year-old, Margaret had refused to employ the title “Miss” when addressing a letter to her friend Ellen Kilshaw, objecting to it as not “half so friendly.”
Amelia’s newly acquired “Mrs.,” along with her change of surname to Bartlett, signified a nearly unbridgeable gap.

For visits from Elizabeth Randall, the Boston school friend she had once shielded from James Clarke’s romantic overtures, Margaret put aside her needlework to spend lazy afternoons or moonlit nights drifting in a rowboat on the river. The Randalls owned a summer house nearby, but Elizabeth, with no family school to keep and a new beau she was testing as a marriage prospect, had a habit of prattling on in a way that could “oercloud my courage of soul,” Margaret groused. Worse, Elizabeth’s connections in Groton “brought me into a closeness of contact with the townspeople” that felt “profaning or at least un
nun
like.”
Despite her complaints about the isolation, Margaret stubbornly wished to maintain a hermit’s seclusion if she had to be in the country. At times she even boasted of feeling “wild and free” and claimed to “mourn [th]at I was not brought up in this solitude.”
But those moments were rare and passed all too quickly. “I am not a nun,” Margaret wrote emphatically to James Clarke, whose first visit to Groton in June stirred a nearly amorous declaration from him.
“How free” their conversation had been, he wrote after he’d gotten home to Cambridge, “yet what unity!” James reveled in the memory: “I felt as if our minds were embracing.”

Yet uncertainty about
what
she was—or was to be—clouded this friendship as well, creating new tensions between the two “cousins” as they left their years of companionable study behind. James had completed his training for the ministry at Harvard, relying on Margaret’s advice in crafting several of his first sermons. On one of her last days in Cambridge, she heard him deliver a homily on a biblical text they both treasured, knowing it as Goethe’s favorite: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”
Unlike Margaret, James
had
found something to do. He’d accepted a post as minister to a small congregation in Louisville, Kentucky, aiming to spread a liberal gospel to the evangelical West. “The wor[ld] receives you as a man,” Margaret acknowledged when she had absorbed the news that James would soon embark on his vocation, while she was left to sew for and school a quartet of younger siblings.
When James appeared in Groton a second time to say goodbye, Margaret’s loneliness and longing for her own “engrossing object of pursuit”
overwhelmed her as she attempted to “compress all I had ever thought and felt towards you in the retrospect of a few hours.”

What were those thoughts and feelings? James had upset a delicate balance by conjuring that cerebral embrace; a month later, in a first letter from Kentucky, he would recall “thrilling at the heart” with “the slight sympathetic touch” of Margaret’s fingers “one night when I parted from you at Elizabeth [Randall]’s door in an hour of gloom.”
Neither was in love with the other in the conventional sense. James, who’d once asked, in sympathy with Margaret’s plight, “Why was she a woman?” could never imagine Margaret as his wife; and Margaret, bruised by George Davis’s rejection, depended on the refuge from courting rituals that her friendship with James offered, a safe haven of open, fraternal communion.
Their connection was deep, defying categorization, borrowing freely from the language and gestures of romance, friendship, familial affection, and a mentorship that ran in both directions. “Fair, pure, noble lady moon,” James saluted Margaret by letter, or “my sweet confidant” and “best, truest one.”
Yet on the day he traveled to Groton to say goodbye, he clammed up rather than resume singing his hymn to their unity of mind. Margaret was hurt. “Your manner repressed me,” she scolded afterward, and she passed up the opportunity to reprise her feelings, “to give you my
blessing.
”