Margaret Fuller (16 page)

Leaving the house, escaping “into the open air,” Margaret renewed her vow to follow the “Ought”—her commitment to duty, the care of her mother and siblings. But she could not abide the idea of dedicating herself to a course of action—or inaction—that might result in such “grub-like lives” for her mother and herself, “undignified even by passion,—these life-long quenchings of the spark divine.”

Out of these twin encounters with female destitution and despair, Margaret forged twin resolves: to support her family
and
to follow a personal destiny. She would leave Groton to seek her fortune in the city—play the wage-earning eldest son or father, even though she was of the “softer sex.” On her twenty-sixth birthday, May 23, Margaret took stock of her present situation, in light of her choice to forgo the “intellectual resources” and restorative companionship she might have acquired in traveling to Europe: “What I can do with my pen, I know not. At present, I feel no confidence or hope. The expectations so many have been led to cherish by my conversational powers, I am disposed to deem ill-founded. I do not think I can produce a valuable work. I do not feel in my bosom that confidence necessary to sustain me in such undertakings,—the confidence of genius. But I am now but just recovered from bodily illness, and still heart-broken by sorrow and disappointment. I may be renewed again.” In the meantime, “I will make up my mind to teach.”

Afterward Margaret would understand she had come late to the party at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School. But at the time she accepted the job in Boston as Alcott’s teaching assistant in the fall of 1836, she believed she was joining a crusade in full swing that would also supply the employment she needed to “get money, which I will use for the benefit of my dear, gentle, suffering mother,—my brothers and sister.”
She didn’t yet know that her predecessors, the self-educated historian and innovative schoolteacher Elizabeth Peabody and her younger sisters, Mary and Sophia, had not been paid a cent for their work over the past two years since the school’s founding in September 1834, when Elizabeth had gathered pupils from the progressive-minded families of Beacon Hill and the still fashionable residential districts near the waterfront and offered them up to the dreamy idealist Alcott for his educational experiment.

The sisters, in particular Elizabeth, had made certain the Temple School was both an academic and a popular success by conducting the school’s regular lessons in Latin, math, and geography, leaving Bronson Alcott free to lead his young pupils in the daily Socratic dialogues on “spiritual philosophy” that formed the centerpiece of his progressive pedagogy, which the sisters faithfully recorded.
Elizabeth had turned these transcripts into a book,
Record of a School,
which, appearing in the spring of 1835, commenced a flood of Transcendentalist publications—including James Freeman Clarke’s
Western Messenger
with Margaret’s reviews, as well as Emerson’s first book, his rhapsodic
Nature
—that put the reformers’ ideas before the public. Alcott believed, along with Elizabeth Peabody, that children already possessed the seeds of knowledge—all that was needed was an able facilitator, such as Alcott, to “cultivate the heart, and to bring out from the child’s own mind the principles which are to govern his character.”
The conversations reported in
Record of a School
showed children as young as five uttering naive wisdom on surprisingly weighty matters, from “the advantage of having an imagination” to the immortality of the human soul.
It was a system bound to appeal to Margaret, who so far had little practical experience in a classroom, even more powerfully than it had to Elizabeth Peabody, who had been running her own schools for more than a decade before joining forces with Alcott.

Elizabeth Peabody, who liked to act as an intellectual impresario among Boston’s freethinkers, should have been the one to introduce Margaret to Bronson Alcott. Since Timothy Fuller’s death had left Margaret responsible for her family—a situation Elizabeth Peabody understood, with her own ne’er-do-well younger brothers and an impecunious dentist for a father—she had done all she could for Margaret, whom she remembered from her years as a wunderkind in Dr. Park’s Boston school. A free-ranging conversation with the eighteen-year-old Margaret while she still lived in the Dana mansion in Cambridge had left Elizabeth feeling “I had seen the Universe,” she later recalled.

In the spring of 1836, when Margaret still held out the hope of earning a living by her pen, Elizabeth had paved the way for Margaret’s publication that year of three ambitious essays on British and German literature in the
American Monthly Magazine,
edited by Elizabeth’s friend Park Benjamin. In the last of these, Margaret made a case for the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth as “the pilot-minds of the age,” whose work allowed readers to glimpse “that which lies beyond” while simultaneously being “roused to do and dare for ourselves.”
These prophets of the new era had found a way to express what Margaret termed the “mind-emotions”—the feelings that fueled her thoughts and aspirations with a passion more intense than the “heart-emotions,” the province of poets from earlier times.
It was important writing, but before accepting Elizabeth’s aid she had imperiously sniped at the older woman, “I would gladly sell some part of my mind for lucre . . . but I will not sell my soul . . . I am
not
willing to have what I write mutilated, or what I ought to say dictated to suit the public taste.”
Never mind that she had spent the greater part of the past year, as she later wrote to Sam Ward, pursuing a “liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men”—and women—with the precise aim of discerning the needs and interests of the reading public.

Elizabeth had also wangled an invitation for Margaret to stay with the Emersons in Concord in January. Postponed until the summer, this first visit nonetheless turned out to be a success. Waldo, at first put off by Margaret’s forthright manner and obvious efforts to charm him, was ultimately won over. “I believe we all here shared your respect for Miss Fuller’s gifts & character,” Waldo wrote to Elizabeth, grateful she had pressed for the visit. Perhaps Margaret read to Waldo and Lidian a poem she had composed and published that spring in a Boston newspaper, expressing sympathy after Waldo’s favorite brother, Charles, died of tuberculosis in early May, a loss that was felt deeply by all who knew the family; writing of efforts to “assuage grief’s dread excess,” Margaret may also have recalled her own periods of mourning for infant brother and father.
In return, Waldo read aloud to Margaret his “little book called ‘Nature,’” then still in manuscript.
But it was Margaret’s ready wit that Waldo remarked on to Elizabeth Peabody: “She has the quickest apprehension & immediately learned all we knew & had us at her mercy when she pleased to make us laugh.” His wife, Lidian, wrote more plainly: “We like her—she likes us.”
In a letter to his brother William, the ruggedly handsome six-foot-tall Concord sage said more: talking to Margaret Fuller was “like being set in a large place. You stretch your limbs & dilate to your utmost size.”
Margaret’s stay in the large white frame house on the main road from Cambridge, where she occupied a guest room on the ground floor across the hall from Waldo’s study, was extended to a week and more.

But that summer, Elizabeth Peabody had a long-overdue falling-out with Bronson Alcott when she withdrew her support from the new volume of conversations he planned to publish. His insistence on including passages in which children discussed the processes of human conception and birth, taboo in polite society, threatened the future of the school, she’d warned him. Already, concerned parents were withdrawing their children. Elizabeth received a letter from her younger sister Mary advising her to resign before her reputation was ruined. Mary had come to believe that, aside from the scandalous content, Alcott’s conversations with the children were not so innocent in method: he was planting his own ideas in his young pupils’ minds, leading them to conclusions he favored, even “question[ing]” them “out of their opinions.”
Not particularly known for tact, Elizabeth had nevertheless attempted to conceal the depth of her reservations about Alcott’s system as a whole in order to keep the peace. But when she moved into the Alcott household that summer, accepting room and board in partial payment of the back salary she was owed, Bronson’s wife, Abigail, had opened a packet of Mary’s letters to Elizabeth and found out their true opinions. Elizabeth, outraged at the violation of her privacy and frightened by Abigail Alcott’s spiteful accusations of disloyalty, packed and left the house—with its brood of three small daughters, Anna, Louisa May, and the baby Elizabeth, named for Peabody as another form of payment in kind—and the city of Boston to live with her family twenty miles north in the old port town of Salem.

So it was that during Margaret’s summertime visit with the Emersons, she met Bronson Alcott, the flaxen-haired aging faun of the Transcendentalist inner circle, who arrived in Concord the same day Elizabeth Peabody fled Boston, casually speaking of his need for a substitute. A self-taught country-bred improviser—some would say charlatan—Alcott really did need a second teacher in his school: he simply didn’t know enough to teach the basic academic subjects. Elizabeth’s wayward youngest sister, Sophia, had taken her place for the time being, moving into the Alcott house and siding with Abigail, but he understood that Sophia’s rebellion from Elizabeth’s authority couldn’t last long.

Alcott may also have hinted that Margaret (whom he would ultimately deem “more liberal than almost any mind among us” and certain to “add enduring glory to female literature”)
could do better than Elizabeth, which would have appealed to Margaret’s vanity. Elizabeth Peabody was so far the most active female Transcendentalist, succeeding where Margaret had failed. Her published translations from the French philosopher de Gérando’s
Self-Education
and
Visitor of the Poor
influenced Emerson’s thought and the younger rebellious Unitarian ministers’ actions, and her three-part series of essays on the historical sources and contemporary relevance of the Old Testament appeared in the
Christian Examiner
the same year Margaret’s reviews had been rejected. A fourth essay had been slated for publication, but the conservative editor Andrews Norton, known as the Unitarian “Pope,” had balked at Elizabeth’s introduction of the concept of “transcendentalism”—a term, until then, not seen in print in the United States—and put an end to the series.
So she had suffered the sanctifying martyrdom of censorship by the Unitarian establishment as well. If Elizabeth had been, like Harriet Martineau, a visitor from Europe, only temporarily on the scene, Margaret might have put herself under her sway. Instead, only six years older than Margaret and with a reputation for sloppy hair and clothes, and a style of assertiveness that almost always managed to “offend,” as Waldo Emerson ultimately concluded, Elizabeth Peabody was another disturbing model of femininity that Margaret preferred to look away from during the pivotal year after her father’s death—despite Elizabeth’s persistent offers of help, which Margaret nearly always accepted.

In September of 1837, Margaret settled into a room in her uncle Henry’s house on Avon Place in Boston and, with Elizabeth Peabody out of the way in Salem, took on some of the many roles the older woman had played for over a decade in the more populous, forward-looking city. She accepted Bronson Alcott’s offer of employment but delayed starting until December, gathering a brood of older teenage and young-adult women for classes in French, German, and Italian literature, many of them former pupils of Elizabeth Peabody in her advanced world history classes. But Margaret won them over in an entirely different way. Margaret was, by disposition, more galvanizer than teacher. She was proud of her “magnetic power over young women,” as she described her ability to draw pupils “into my sphere.” She saw to it that within three months the beginning German class was translating twenty pages per lesson, the advanced language students reading whole volumes of Goethe and Dante. But the “sympathy and time” she offered in sometimes taxing amounts to a handful of the girls, particularly Caroline Sturgis, the high-spirited daughter of the China-trade baron Captain William Sturgis and youngest sister of Margaret’s girlhood friend Ellen, pointed her teacher-student relationships in the direction of deeper friendship.
In truth, Margaret never liked the formal relationship of teacher and pupil, which reminded her too much of her straitened circumstances. It was best to be paid for what she might have done anyway: befriend and inspire.

Margaret also began making weekly evening visits to the Boston household of the Reverend William Ellery Channing, the charismatic minister who had introduced the concepts of Unitarianism, at first deemed blatantly heretical, to America. In a series of stirring sermons beginning in 1815 and widely circulated in print, Channing outlined his precepts of man’s “likeness to God,” arguing that every human soul is fed by its unique spark of the divine and the essential humanity—not divinity—of Jesus. Taken together, these radical notions dismantled the Holy Trinity, leaving Unitarians to believe in the one God residing in the human heart. But by the time Margaret began spending evenings with Channing, his liberal religion had, within two short decades, been codified into an establishment credo that emphasized intellection over intuition, and the new generation was now straying from it, toward Transcendentalism’s more secular, nature-oriented humanism. As Emerson would confide to Elizabeth Peabody when he decided to further distance himself from the institution of the church by putting an end to his supply preaching two years later, “Whoever would preach Christ in these times must say nothing about him!”

Margaret offered Reverend Channing her services in translating aloud for him the works of her favorite German writers, although Channing professed a disdain of Goethe on moral grounds. It was the old
Elective Affinities
taint, amplified by some real-life gossip: Goethe was rumored to have lived unmarried with his lover, Christiane Vulpius, for many years, marrying her only after the birth of their son. Margaret herself had been “greatly pained and troubled” when she’d learned of the story earlier in the year, writing to James Clarke, “I had no idea . . . [he] went so far with his experimentalizing in
real life.
I had not supposed he ‘
was
’ all he ‘
writ.
’”