Margaret Fuller (21 page)

Perhaps some of the verses she’d submitted to Dwight were clumsy, but these two were not. And even if they weren’t her own private “overflowings,” the Goethe lyrics expressed poignantly Margaret’s twin preoccupations with frustrated ambition and failed love. In the first, a fledgling eagle, wounded in the wing by a “huntsman’s dart,” loses the “power to soar”; as the young eagle stares longingly into the heavens, “a tear glistens in his haughty eye.”
A pair of doves befriend the “inly-mourning” bird and remind him that although he cannot fly or hunt, he can still feed on the “superfluous wealth of the wood-bushes,” drink from the brook, take pleasure in flowers, trees, and sunset: “the spirit of content / Gives all that we can know of bliss.” It was a lesson Margaret would never fully master, but rehearsing the lines surely eased her hungry soul.

“To a Golden Heart” sings a darker tune, but one that must have provided Margaret the solace of fellow feeling as she worked out her translation, still lacking a love to replace her infatuation with George Davis.
A spurned lover wears a heart-shaped medallion around his neck, a “Remembrancer of joys long passed away,” a gift from his beloved Lili. The poet laments, “Stronger thy chain than that which bound the heart,” yet he cannot bring himself to put aside “the prisoner’s badge.” His lost love binds him, defines him.

Both poems speak a man’s feelings; Margaret was, after all, translating Goethe. Was it the masculine voice of these griefs that made her consider them “universal,” appealing to the “common heart of
man,
” unlike her own “overflowings”? It would take several years for Margaret to move beyond the relative safety of critical writing, to feel certain that her private thoughts
as a woman
had universal appeal, and longer still to bring “Margaret” into her byline. For now, she was gratified to have a place in the anthology and to find her biography of Goethe announced in Dwight’s preface: “there is reason to expect, before long, a life of Goethe, from one qualified, in an eminent degree, for such an arduous task.”

Home in Groton for the first months of 1839, the last months she would have a home there, Margaret turned her attention to completing her translation of Johann Peter Eckermann’s
Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life,
also advertised by Dwight as “in course of preparation.”
She had not lived at home since the last years of Timothy Fuller’s life, and the stern family patriarch loomed large in her imagination as she walked the grounds each morning, then returned to her papers, “lying in heaps”
about her, to work over the words of her adopted father figure. The book amounted to a “monologue” by Goethe, not a true conversation, she observed in her translator’s preface.
There had been no chance to listen to Timothy reminisce about his life and work in the manner of Goethe’s young disciple Eckermann, nor had Margaret been inclined to draw him out, to her regret. Yet she remembered how, even when he was alive, she had always missed her father, a man so full of his own plans for his oldest daughter that he failed to see her clearly. Goethe’s words and life example, summarized in her preface, answered her need now: “He knew both what he sought and how to seek it.”

Margaret felt relieved to have escaped Providence and the grueling round of classes, and she hardly missed Boston, where “it was all tea and dinner parties, and long conversations and pictures” on her stolen visits over the past two years, she recalled in a letter to James Clarke.
But as the April deadline to vacate the Groton homestead neared, reserving time for the translation became increasingly difficult. She spent hours sorting through her father’s papers—a “hackneyed moral”
might be drawn from them, Margaret decided, as she catalogued the remnants of an ultimately frustrated career. Timothy’s bitter withdrawal from public life had been his undoing. Certainly it had brought the family nothing but hardship, compounded now with “the disorders of a house which has lost its head.”
Her guilty grief for Timothy was beginning to include more rancor than reverence.

Packing, arranging for the rental of a farmhouse in Jamaica Plain that she would share with her mother and brother Richard (five miles from Boston, with land enough to pasture the family cow), playing a few final melodies on the piano her father had bought her—all this brought on headaches and back pain. The piano, which would be sold at auction along with many of Timothy’s books and other family belongings, was a relic of that distant time when Margaret had idealized Ellen Kilshaw and imagined for herself a life of feminine accomplishment rewarded by an advantageous marriage. Marriage, she would one day write, “is the natural means of forming a sphere, of taking root on the earth”—how much “more strength” was required “to do this” alone!

Now Margaret refused to give up the task near to hand—her translation—even if it meant dictating to her brother Richard and correcting his pages, a process nearly as laborious as writing them out herself. The work, and the knowledge that it was expected, kept her driving toward completion—“as if an intellectual person ever had a night’s rest,” she sputtered to Waldo Emerson.
On her twenty-ninth birthday, May 23, 1839, she signed her translator’s preface at her desk in the new house, Willow Brook, in Jamaica Plain, and sent the manuscript to press, a full volume from the pen of “S. M. Fuller.”

Waldo was delighted with her
Conversations,
and with Margaret’s preface in particular—“a brilliant statement.” The translation was “a beneficent action for which America will long thank you.” Most of all, the book gave him confidence that “you can write on Goethe” with “decision and intelligence,” and in “good English”; already she had managed, in
Conversations,
to “scatter all the popular nonsense about him.”

Margaret had confided in Waldo her worry that she might not be capable of the larger biographical project, and he’d commiserated as he worked to finish his own first book of essays, a more ambitious undertaking than the slim volume
Nature
and one that, like a full biography, so easily “daunts & chills” a writer. Trusting in her powers would help conquer the fear that she might not write a book worthy of her subject: “self possession is all,” he counseled, and “our hero”—Goethe—“shall follow as he may.” The knowledge that Waldo Emerson accepted her as a comrade in authorship may have boosted Margaret’s confidence as much as his backhanded compliment: “I know that not possibly can you write a bad book a dull page, if only you indulge yourself and take up your work proudly.”
She had grown up with praise phrased mostly in negatives.

Yet how much could Margaret afford to “indulge” herself? Could she “ransom more time for writing,”
as she once expressed her ever-present need, than the few months she’d set aside while still in Groton and the stolen moments since the move to Willow Brook? Writing a book was far different from translating one, albeit one with a “brilliant” preface. She promised Waldo she would write a trial chapter of her Goethe biography that summer—“speed the pen,”
he’d urged—and then threw herself “unremittingly” into several months of “thought and study,” knowing she would have to reckon with finances come fall.
She’d already begun negotiations with the parents of three former Greene Street School pupils for the girls to board with the Fullers in Jamaica Plain, sharing the rent and paying Margaret to complete their education.
Ever since Bronson Alcott had shorted her on wages, Margaret had been careful to set terms precisely and well in advance; in Providence she had instituted the practice of billing by the quarter-hour for private language lessons, so as not to let her instinctive generosity erode her profits.

Taking a ten-day vacation in Bristol, Rhode Island, in August, at the home of an old friend from Miss Prescott’s school, Mary Soley DeWolfe, who had married a wealthy descendant of the triangle-trade baron James DeWolfe (“the richest and the worst” of those slave traders, as was commonly known), Margaret was able to revive some of the carefree feelings she enjoyed when her own family’s fortunes were more stable.
She put aside her foreign language texts and read a biography of Sir Walter Scott that she found in the “ill stocked”
library of the mansion house, rode in an open carriage up gently sloping Mount Hope (part of her host’s extensive properties) for a view of Narragansett Bay, stretched out to rest on boulders at the seashore, and, with Mary, narrowly escaped a trampling by a charging stallion pastured on the estate—they drew their parasols in self-defense. It was all delightful, but Margaret was fully aware that her friend must see her as “destitute of all she thinks valuable”: “beauty, money, fixed station in society.”
Occupied with matters of dress and household decoration, the teasing yet gracious Mary DeWolfe was “ignorant of my mental compensations”—the satisfaction that Margaret, the only “live wire”
in the DeWolfe household that week, took in study and conversation with intellectual companions. Mary, even more than Margaret, was distressed that her guest was “unsustained” and “uncertain as to the future.”

Visiting the “fine houses” of the rich “makes my annoyances seem light” compared to the tiresome burdens of wealth, Margaret would eventually conclude. She had come far enough not to wish herself back again; experience had taught her “how much characters require the discipline of difficult circumstances” to develop their full powers. Would she have achieved the little so far to her credit without the spur of necessity? “I am safer,” she believed, for “I do not sleep on roses,” and a vacation among the rich “will not last long enough to spoil me.”
She would continue to savor weeks of recuperation from overwork at the homes of her more prosperous friends without compunction, never minding that she could not reciprocate. What troubled her far more than her lack of funds and the uncertainty of her position were the real limits imposed upon her sex, both by external prohibitions on schooling and employment and by the self-restraint that women learned and internalized: “A man’s ambition with a woman’s heart.—’Tis an accursed lot,” she wrote in her journal at summer’s end.

In the final weeks of August, Margaret devised a plan to unite the two—her professional ambitions and her concerns on behalf of women. She borrowed the idea from Bronson Alcott, who since losing his Temple School had taken up an itinerant “Ministry of Talking,” as he called it, leading conversations for adults on the spiritual topics that had gotten him into trouble in the classroom—and getting paid for it.
Margaret determined to try the same with a class of adult women in Boston. Her aim was more practical than spiritual, however: to “ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action,” as she wrote in a letter to Sophia Ripley, proposing a series of weekly “Conversations” to begin in the fall of 1839 and continue through the spring, if interest remained strong. She asked both Sophia Ripley and Elizabeth Peabody to help her gather a “circle” of women “desirous to answer the great questions. What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” Too often, Margaret observed, thinking perhaps of her mother or the aged women in the Groton cabin, it is only when “their best years are gone by” that women begin to ask these questions—too late to profit from the answers.

Margaret had been asking the “great” questions of
herself
since childhood—“How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?”—struggling “under these limitations of time and space and human nature” to find answers. But in adulthood the scope of her questions had widened to take in all women, as she recognized how much even
her
answers had to do with her sex. In the years since Timothy’s death, as she was thrown upon her own devices in a “time and space” inhospitable to a woman of ambition, she could no longer see herself as a proxy oldest son, no longer imagine herself an oarsman in the
Aeneid,
pulling toward victory—nor did she want to. She longed to experience life with her “woman’s heart.”

Still, her plan was to make the classics—in particular classical myth—the focus of discussion. She wanted other women to feel the impulse to action she’d received from these tales as a child drawn to stories of Greek and Roman vitality rather than to parables of Christian piety and submission. Her passion for Greco-Roman myth had only been heightened through her German studies when she discovered that Goethe and Schiller, whose adulatory poem “The Gods of Greece” she knew well, also viewed Apollo, Jupiter, Venus, and Minerva as exemplars of human virtues, or, as Margaret herself phrased it, “great instincts—or ideas—or facts of the internal constitution separated & personified.”
As she wrote to Cary Sturgis, “These Greeks no more merged the human in the divine than the divine in the human.” In them, the real and the ideal were united, thought and deed fused in the “active soul” Margaret wished to become. “I cannot live without mine own particular star; but my foot is on the earth and I wish to walk over it until my wings be grown.” Despite painful seasons of self-doubt or retreat from the workaday world into illness, Margaret reveled in the “majesty of earth”: “its roaring sea that dashes against the crag—I love its sounding cataract, its lava rush, its whirlwind, its rivers” as much as the distant, serene “blue sky” of the ideal. “I will use my microscope as well as my telescope.”

The radicalism of Margaret’s plan would be evident to anyone at the time. Boys read Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
his exuberant accounts in Latin of the lusty Greek gods and goddesses (the best source of these tales before Thomas Bulfinch’s English translations,
The Age of Fable,
appeared in 1855). Girls did not. Margaret, with her boy’s education and full immersion in German Romantic “mythomania,”
had stories to tell and lessons to draw from them that few of her adult female contemporaries knew or could access.

More radical still was her intention to promote an open discussion in which all participants could freely “state their doubts and difficulties with hope of gaining aid from the experience or aspirations of others.”
As with her advanced class at the Greene Street School, Margaret would insist that each woman be “willing to communicate what was in her mind.”
This was, she wrote elsewhere, “an age of consciousness”
—an “era of experiment,”
of “illumination”
—and she was determined that the women of her circle experience the gains that the men of the Transcendental Club fraternity derived from focused group discussion, whether or not their essential subject was woman. She would bring them together “undefended by rouge or candlelight,”
dispense with the pointless, artificial conventions of feminine parlor chat—“digressing into personalities or commonplaces,”
in a word, gossip—and require instead a “simple & clear effort for expression.”