Margaret Fuller (18 page)

The “peculiar aspects of the times,” Waldo Emerson informed his listeners, “advertise us of radical errors somewhere” that can be corrected only by “reform of our culture”: a new system of education. A moment like this one, of “calamity and alarm,” when “a commercial or political revolution has shattered” the calm of daily life, was no time to be “afraid of change, afraid of thought.” It was time, instead, to throw off the “desperate conservatism” that “clings with both hands to every dead form in the schools, in the state, in the church.”

“The disease of which the world lies sick,” he argued, is “the inaction of the higher faculties of man.”
He called on educators to provide the nation’s deliverance, but they must do more than teach numbers, words, and facts, and instead make use of the “capital secret of their profession, namely, to convert life into truth, or to show the meaning of events.”
They must “teach self-trust,” allow the student to explore “the resources of his mind” and there discover “all his strength.”
“Amid the swarming population how few men!”
he scolded, a charge that would serve as impetus for the revelatory speech he delivered two months later to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society at commencement. In “The American Scholar” he would define the ideal citizen as “
Man Thinking.
”

And then he was gone, leaving a bewildered audience—few, as Margaret might have predicted, could follow or approve his train of thought—and a deeply inspired twenty-seven-year-old schoolmistress. Margaret now had to make sense of her new assignment, to somehow “convert life into truth” and “show the meaning of events” to the girls in her charge: sixty of them, ages ten to eighteen, seated in long rows filling one half of the Greene Street School’s enormous interior room and facing her expectantly. On the opposite side of the white-walled, orange-carpeted Great Hall, sixty boys worked their lessons under Hiram Fuller’s guidance.

The well-appointed schoolroom, with a grand piano against one wall and visitors’ couches ranged against another, with classical statuary and a portrait of Hiram Fuller for decoration, gave an air of theater to the experiment. Divide and hope to conquer was all Margaret could manage at first, however, organizing her pupils into Latin sections according to ability, and composition, elocution, ethics, world history, and natural history classes by age. Two other women taught mathematics, French, drawing, and dancing to the girls, so these need not be her concern. Margaret arranged for regular sessions with each group in the antechambers designed for recitations, insisting on conversation instead. The rule was simple: in order to remain in the class, each girl must be “willing to communicate what was in her mind.”
Soon she was writing to Elizabeth Peabody, “I believe I do very well.”

“There is room here,” she wrote to Waldo Emerson, as if in answer to his call for reform, “for a great move in the cause of education.” Many of the girls “begin already to attempt to walk in the ways I point . . . Activity of mind, accuracy of processes, constant looking for principles, and search after the good and beautiful.”
As she pushed the girls to express their thoughts vocally and in their journals each day—girls whose “hearts are right”
but whose minds had previously been “absolutely torpid,”
she wrote to Elizabeth Peabody—she discovered that “this experience here will be useful to me, if not to Providence, for I am bringing my opinions to the test.”

Hiram Fuller liked nothing better than to show off his Greene Street School pupils to town dignitaries or visiting celebrities, and he held public exhibitions every two weeks. But only boys participated, a convention he would not break. Margaret chafed at having her girls sit silently in the audience as the boys spoke their pieces or answered questions. She began calling attention to the girls’ superior performance in beginning Latin, her one coeducational class, and she formulated a curriculum in her other classes designed to persuade the girls of their intellectual strengths. In natural history, she coaxed them out of their “antipathy” to worms and caterpillars and told them the myth of Arachne—“an ambitious young lady who wanted to weave as fine as the goddess of Minerva,” one young student recorded in her journal—when they studied spiders.

Margaret “spoke upon what woman could do,” another student recorded, and “said she should like to see a woman everything she might be, in intellect and character.”
Whenever possible, she dwelled on examples of powerful women from classical history and myth: Atalanta, who “wished to live in the enjoyment of ‘single blessedness,’”
Daphne, Aspasia, Sappho, and Diotima.
She required reading by women authors, from the Connecticut poet Lydia Sigourney to the British essayist Anna Jameson, who wrote on literary and historical heroines, and of course de Staël. When teaching Wordsworth, she singled out his poems about women: “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots” received a full lesson and a written analysis as homework.
Even Hiram Fuller seemed to catch on, calling the entire school—boys
and
girls—to attention at midsummer with the news of the eighteen-year-old Princess Victoria’s ascension to the British throne.

Margaret herself provided the best model of all. When she felt her students weren’t striving for original thought in their journals, she started one herself and read passages aloud. “How and when did she ever learn about everybody that existed?” one of her older students asked in her own journal. “I wonder if I shall know an eighth part of what she does.”
Another student wrote to her brother, who was studying law at Harvard, “I wish you could hear her talk a few moments. I almost stand in awe of her, she is such a literary being.”

But again Margaret was wearing herself out. At least once a month, with a regularity that suggests an underlying hormonal cause of her migraines, she missed school for a half-day or more because of illness. Through her first summer at Greene Street, she held herself to a punishing daily schedule. She had been receiving books selected and shipped from Europe by the Farrars, Anna Barker, and Sam Ward, to help with her research on Goethe, and she woke herself at 4:30 or 5:00 each morning to dress quickly, then read and take notes until breakfast at 7:30. By 8:30, when she arrived at the handsome school building and passed between its enormous white columns to enter the Great Hall and take up her teaching duties, she was often exhausted and resentful at having to “serve two masters”: her own inner drive for literary achievement and the requirement to support herself and her family.

Sometimes her frustration showed in impatience with her students, whose “barbarous ignorance”
at times seemed to Margaret almost a personal affront: teaching sixty “miserably prepared”
young girls was not the professional life she had imagined for herself. The girls’ journals registered fear of the sometimes “satirical” or “
very severe
” Miss Fuller—who “is very critical and sometimes cuts us up into bits”—along with admiration for “the infinite capacity of her mind” and a craving for her attention. When one older student burst into tears after being singled out for failing to prepare for class, Margaret later extended a written apology—“I often regret that you have not a teacher who has more heart, more health, more energy to spend upon you than I have.” Although she admitted she may have been “too rough” with the girl, Margaret still hoped to “teach her more confidence and self-possession.” She would rather her students learn to stand up to pressure than be indulged for shortcomings well within their power to correct: “I dare not be
generous
lest I should thus be unable to be
just.
”
In the end, all her students learned that “we must
think
as well as
study,
and
talk
as well as
recite.
”

When school closed for a summer recess in late August, Margaret left Providence for Cambridge, an invited guest in the audience for Waldo Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address and in his Concord home for the week following. The summer months had proven New England steadier in the financial crisis than other parts of the country; at Harvard, Waldo’s message of “self-trust” turned less despairing and more visionary. For those who were ready for it, his “American Scholar” speech would mark a new era: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” they heard. He challenged his listeners to become intellectually “free and brave,” to cultivate “heroic” minds, and more: the scholar must rise from his desk—“Life is our dictionary”—and become a man of action. “The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul,” he exhorted. “The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man.” In answer to his earlier complaint at Providence (“how few men!”), he looked to the time when all men’s minds would become active, and offered this prediction: “A nation of men will for the first time exist.”

Some years later Margaret would write of Waldo Emerson’s “sermons” that “several of these stand apart in memory, like landmarks of my spiritual history,” and this may have been one of them.
She was accustomed to finding inspiration in literature and lectures aimed at men. Why shouldn’t Waldo direct his words on this day to the male Harvard graduates, faculty, and president? But Margaret soon adapted Waldo’s theme to her own use, drawing him into conversation a few days later in Concord on the subject of women. “Who would be a goody,” she asserted, employing the old-fashioned term for housewife, “that could be a genius?”
Women too, as Margaret had been entreating her pupils all summer, must cultivate “the active soul.” And they would prefer to, if given the chance. Her question and its ramifications stayed with Waldo, possibly as a key to Margaret’s character rather than women as a group, but he recorded her comment in his journal, his personal storehouse of overheard wisdom.

All summer the two had traded views by letter on the possibilities of friendship in general and, by implication, theirs in particular. In June, after they parted in Providence, Waldo had offered a tantalizing premise: “what is any friend but a holiday good for nothing if it lasts all the time, and intensating its good always as the interval.”
At least Margaret could hope their connection was “intensating” through her long summer absence. Then Waldo had written again, injecting Aristotle’s bleak formulation “O my friends, there is no friend” with even darker meaning: “
O my friends,
there are no friends.” The statement struck Margaret with “a paralyzing conviction,” she wrote back: she was overcome by a “misanthropic” skepticism of “the existence of any real communication between human beings”—or with Waldo. But when he welcomed her visit to Concord at summer’s end, she delivered a teasing acceptance to “my dear
no friends,
Mr and Mrs Emerson.”

The subject of women had come up in the wake of Margaret’s incursion into another all-male bastion, again at Waldo’s instigation. For the past year a group of rebel ministers had been meeting at one another’s houses to discuss ideas for reform, calling themselves variously “Mr. Hedge’s Club,”
the club of the “Like-Minded” (“because no two of us thought alike”),
or simply the Transcendental Club. Margaret’s friend Henry Hedge’s frequent trips to Boston from Bangor set the timing of the meetings. Waldo, as elder statesman, had already persuaded the group to relax its qualifications to admit one lay member, Bronson Alcott. The other regulars included James Clarke when he was in town, George Ripley, Theodore Parker (who’d read his way through the Harvard curriculum on his own to win entrance to Harvard Divinity School), and John Sullivan Dwight, another newly minted preacher with a yen for German Romantic music and poetry. Margaret already knew Dwight because he had solicited her translations from Goethe for a volume of German verse he was collecting for George Ripley’s series Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature.

The club was set to meet the day after Waldo’s Phi Beta Kappa speech for an “all-day party”
in Concord, with discussion of “the progress of Society”
as the order of the day. Awkwardly, Waldo hinted to Margaret in advance that he would invite her as well, along with two women of his extended Concord family, Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Ripley: “who knows but the wise men in an hour more timid or more gracious may crave the aid of wise & blessed women at their session.”
The three women swelled the ranks of the “like-minded” that day to eighteen, primarily listening as the men talked and Lidian Emerson hovered in the background as
genius domi,
plying the “Spiritualists” with a “noble great piece” of beef, a leg of mutton, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, applesauce, and rice pudding with currants.
A week later, Margaret attended a second session, at James Clarke’s mother’s house in the Boston suburb of Newton, on her way back to Providence; there Sarah Clarke and Elizabeth Peabody joined in, confirming the group’s openness to female participation, although the numbers would remain few.

Margaret left no record of these historic meetings in her letters or journals at the time, but they made their mark. When she returned to Providence, where autumn brought out the city’s intelligentsia, she found herself welcomed into the Coliseum Club, a group of men and women writers, politicians, and other professionals who were themselves debating the question of “the progress of Society”: had civilization advanced over the centuries? It was a lightning-rod topic; some members defended the status quo, while others—fewer—saw signs of trouble lurking in the country’s financial crisis and a need for change. Every two weeks, one member presented a paper, and Margaret became the fourth to give her ideas on the subject.

Margaret was a skeptic on the topic of progress and a proponent of reform. She found “incompleteness” in the reasoning of her more optimistic Coliseum Club colleagues, as well as in the arguments presented at the Transcendental Club session devoted to the same subject—“a meeting of gentlemen” she had attended “a few months since.”
She allowed that society as a whole may have improved, but what of the individual? The very signs of progress others pointed to—innovations such as the railroad and the steamship—created or exacerbated “immense wants” in the individual: “the diffusion of
information
is not necessarily the diffusion of knowledge,” she explained, and “the triumph over matter does not always or often lead to the triumph of Soul.” And “when it is made over easy for men to communicate with one another, they learn less from one another.” It was time to “reassert the claims of the individual man.” The signs were plain, in the increasing numbers of “men tired of materialism, rushing back into mysticism, weary of the useful, sighing for the beautiful.”