Margaret Fuller (34 page)

Later, traveling alone to Mackinac Island while Sarah and Rebecca Clarke recuperated from summer colds, Margaret witnessed the gathering of the Chippewa and Ottawa tribes—several thousand displaced Indians—to receive the fifth of twenty annual payments, primarily in tobacco, blankets, and other provisions, guaranteed under the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters governing the sale of their lands. The natural beauty of the island, a heavily wooded American Capri with its own fabled arched rock, could not compete with the human drama. Fleets of canoes arrived from all over the Great Lakes; a city of wigwams rose on the beach, illuminated by campfires at night; sonorous Indian flutes penetrated the humid air. During the day, Margaret walked the sun-baked shore, stopping to demonstrate her collapsible parasol to curious Indians, conversing in improvised sign language, kneeling one morning to join the women in pounding their breakfast cornmeal.

None of this gave Margaret any more hope for the Indian peoples or their land. By the end of her tour, she knew that if she returned to the West another year, she would not find the same “
fair rich
EARTH
”;
the “vast flowery plains” would be “broken up for tillage,” the “real old monarch trees” gone forever, “converted into logs and boards.”
She considered it an unalterable fact that within twenty years, or maybe just ten, the Yankee “mode of cultivation” would “obliterate the natural expression of the country.”
She had been fortunate to catch a fleeting glimpse of “the harmony of the first design”
—primeval nature—which the Indians, the region’s “rightful lords,”
had preserved since before the era of the Egyptian and Greek myths Margaret had taught in her Conversations. The West was, or had been until recently, “new, boundless, limitless.” Here, as in Eden, she would write later in
Summer on the Lakes,
there was “neither wall nor road.” The only “gain from the Fall” was “a wagon to ride in”—
the wagon, also, of the “omnivorous traveler,” the “white settler [who] pursues the Indian, and is victor in the chase.”

Frontier wives did not fare well either, Margaret observed. They had followed their husbands west “for affection’s sake,” only to find “a great deal to war with” in their “new lot.” Their “unfitness” for farm life was evident in fatigue and melancholy, the result of strenuous labor and an absence of “resources” for pleasure: “they have not learnt to ride, to drive, to row, alone.” Margaret could only hope that the homesteaders’ daughters might gain an education in “the language of nature,” allowing “the little girls [to] grow up strong, resolute, able”
like those “students of the soil,” the Indian girls who could tell the secrets of western wildflowers.

Pressing farther on to Sault Sainte Marie, Margaret hired two Indian “canoe-men in pink calico shirts” to shoot the famous rapids that ran between Lakes Superior and Huron, an experience that, like her confrontation with Niagara, left her disappointed. Seated on a woven mat in the middle of the canoe, Margaret hoped for at least “one gasp of terror and delight, some sensation entirely new to me.” But the rapids were so swift and the canoe men so expert at fending off jagged rocks that “I found myself in smooth water, before I had time to feel anything but the buoyant pleasure” of the four-minute ride. Not even “the silliest person” could have been frightened.
Better was the trip by ferry back to Mackinac in the company of the frontiersmen she so often reviled. The lone woman traveler in the company, Margaret let herself be entertained by their “sportsman stories”: “How pleasant it was to sit and hear rough men tell pieces out of their own common lives, in place of the frippery talk of some fine circle . . . Free blew the wind, and boldly flowed the stream.”

And then, to her surprise, she was greeted at the landing by Sarah Clarke: “such childish joy I felt, to see . . . the face of one whom I called friend.”

Looking back on her early thirties, Margaret would realize that “I have given almost all my young energies to personal relations.”
The time had not been wasted. Out of her sometimes thwarted desire for connection had emerged the Conversations,
The Dial
—the enterprise that had so often seemed a matter of “writ[ing] constantly to our friends in print”
—and, most important, “The Great Lawsuit,” Margaret’s critique of “personal relations” among men and women, with its demand that “every arbitrary barrier” to women’s progress “be thrown down,” its prediction that the liberation of “many incarcerated souls,” both female and male, would bring “an era of freedom . . . and new revelations” when “new individualities shall be developed in the actual world.”
Derived in large part from private observation and buttressed with historical and literary examples, the essay would prove to be
The Dial
’s most enduring contribution to American thought.
But the time had come to “look abroad into the wide circle” for new mentors and friends, new subjects and ambitions.

Margaret had long believed a “noble career” awaited her, “if I can be unimpeded by cares.” Returning from the West, she felt more capable of realizing that destiny—as if “the language of nature” had educated Margaret to become “strong, resolute, and able.” Experiencing such powerful reactions to other people’s suffering, as she had years earlier when visiting the cottages of her sick and elderly neighbors in Groton, fueled a passion now to “take share in more public life,” to write on large questions for a broad audience.

Her journey back to New England was a different sort of “phantasmagoria,” this time of familiar scenes and faces. Traveling alone again, she chose a route that took her down the Hudson River to New York City, retracing in early autumn the voyage on which she had first met Sam Ward in summer nearly a decade before. This time William Channing, who’d settled with his young family in Manhattan rather than Massachusetts, greeted her on the dock, guiding her to the City Hotel and, the next morning, to Sunday services at his newly formed Society of Christian Union church—a haven for communitarian thinkers—where, to her surprise, Bronson Alcott and an English friend, Charles Lane, were in attendance, seeking support for Fruitlands, their planned utopian settlement on a farm fifteen miles west of Concord. Henry Thoreau was there too, in a back pew. The young Concordian Margaret had come to think of as “the man to be with in the woods” had taken a job as tutor for the children of Waldo’s lawyer brother William on Staten Island.

Margaret stayed long enough among what she had once referred to as “those dim New Yorkers”
to meet a few luminaries, including Horace Greeley, the founding editor, in 1841, of the
New-York Tribune,
who had excerpted long portions of “The Great Lawsuit” for his newspaper, and Henry James Sr., a new acquaintance of Waldo’s who was soon to leave the city for Europe with his wife and young sons, William and Harry. An old hand at travel now, Margaret sympathized with the elder Henry James’s decision: “the student (of books) should see Europe; on its own theatre he better understands the life whence the literature sprang.”

Margaret wrote to Henry James Sr. from the “poor shady little nook” of New England, where, after a stretch of “splendid October days,” she was feeling at home again. Indeed, her quarters on Ellery Street in Cambridge, with a view of the Charles River similar to the one she’d enjoyed from the upper floors of the Dana mansion as a girl, felt to her surprise “as good a place as any in the world.”
The chief reason: Margaret had talked her way into desk privileges at Harvard’s library in palatial Gore Hall, then the most extensive collection of books in the nation, yet never before opened to a woman for anything more than an impromptu tour. Each morning Margaret could walk a short way down the road from the little house she shared with her mother to the turreted stone edifice and “have sweets at will,” like the Harvard men she had once envied.
Over the course of the next several months, she completed the research for
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843,
not caring that she was an object of curiosity to young collegians who “had never before looked upon a woman reading within those sacred precincts.”

Announcing the plan of her travelogue to Waldo, Margaret wrote apologetically that her new project meant there would be “no lives of Goethe, no romances”—the biography and novels she had once dreamed of writing—only this “little book,” which might amount at best to “a kind of letter box,” drawn from her correspondence during the months away.
But as she worked on the manuscript, which grew to include not just revised excerpts from her journal-letters, but poetry, passages of “romance,” and invented dialogues, Margaret began to develop a theory that “in addressing the public at large, it is
not
best to express a thought in as few words as possible.” Instead, she argued, “there is much classic authority for diffuseness.”
She had not written her book on Goethe, but she could follow the example of his entertainingly discursive
Italian Journey,
as well as Lydia Maria Child’s more recent
Letters from New-York,
which combined historical anecdote with contemporary observation, and Harriet Martineau’s politically charged commentary on her tour of the New World,
Society in America.

While Margaret would not defend the improvisational form of
Summer on the Lakes
to Waldo Emerson—in fact, she continued to worry up until publication that “my mind does not act” on the disparate portions of the book “enough to fuse them”
—she sparred with him over his editorship of
The
Dial,
which was foundering under his leadership. She objected that “you would have every thing in it good according to your taste,” which she considered “far too narrow in its range.” As editor, and now as writer, Margaret took the opposite tack: “I wish my tastes and sympathies still more expansive than they are, instead of more severe.”
Literally covering new ground with
Summer on the Lakes,
she could revel in that expansive sensibility.

Margaret consulted Waldo about a publisher for the book and relied on him to act as her representative—the “friend at once efficient and sympathizing” she had lacked only a few years earlier, as she’d complained to James Clarke—but she followed Horace Greeley’s advice instead.
Rather than publish with the Bostonian James Munroe, who had brought out all of Waldo’s books so far, she accepted royalties of ten percent from Little and Brown, a new Boston firm that would share the title page with Charles S. Francis and Company of New York, giving the book a foothold beyond New England.

Henry Thoreau had recommended self-publishing, with production costs to be covered by subscription from
The
Dial
circle; Margaret would take all the profit once expenses were repaid. But she sensed the folly of such a venture in light of the group’s failure to make money on
The Dial.
Still, she looked toward publication warily, having grown accustomed to confronting “the Public at large” from
The
Dial
’s pages, “amid a group of ‘liberally educated and respectable gentlemen’”—never before on her own.
When she signed her
Dial
articles at all, Margaret still used the relatively anonymous byline “F.” For her book she used “S. M. Fuller,” stopping short of announcing her feminine first names to those who didn’t recognize her initials.
But could she count on any who were not already her friends to buy and read the book?

Little and Brown typeset her copy in installments, so that Margaret was proofreading galleys while she continued to compose, writing the final lines on her thirty-fourth birthday, five years after a similarly exhausting effort brought her Eckermann translation to completion. The finished book appeared two weeks later, just a year after she’d set out on the journey west. A second, illustrated edition, with seven of Sarah Clarke’s sketches transferred to etching plates, followed soon after. Despite her anxieties, Margaret hoped publication would usher in “an important era in my life,” and she was not disappointed.

Summer on the Lakes
sold better than any single issue of
The Dial
—seven hundred copies of the more expensive illustrated edition were gone within the year
—and better than Waldo’s first book,
Nature.
But equally important to Margaret was the book’s reception by readers and reviewers. The New York City imprint persuaded the mainstream press that Margaret had distanced herself from that “literary sect” the critics so loved to despise, the Transcendentalists with their distasteful “excellencies and oddities,” as the reviewer for
Graham’s Magazine
in Philadelphia wrote. Edgar Allan Poe, whose reviews carried substantial weight, admired the book’s “graphicality”
—its vivid pictures of the West; Horace Greeley announced in his
New-York Tribune
that
Summer on the Lakes
provided proof that Margaret was “one of the most original as well as intellectual of American Women.”
The New York editor and critic Evert Duyckinck’s admiration ran even deeper: he considered Margaret’s to be “the only genuine American book . . . published this season.” While her old friend Maria Child was put off by the book’s conglomerate form, advising Margaret that “your house is too full; there is too much furniture in your rooms,” Waldo Emerson found virtue in what Child identified as a root problem—Margaret’s “higher education than popular writers usually have.” Waldo wrote to Cary Sturgis that the book had exceeded his expectations and “has a fine superior tone which is the native voice of that extraordinary Margaret.”

In Boston, Margaret was predictably faulted by the
Christian Examiner
for her “reflective tendency.” A former ally, Orestes Brownson, whose Transcendentalism had recently transmuted into a stringent Catholicism, offered the most severe critique, labeling Margaret in his
Quarterly Review
“a heathen priestess, though of what god or goddess we will not pretend to say.” Before addressing the merits of the book itself, Brownson attacked Margaret ad hominem as “deficient in a pure, correct taste . . . and especially in that tidiness we always look for in woman.” Still, Brownson allowed that
Summer on the Lakes
was “marked by flashes of a rare genius, by uncommon and versatile powers, by sentiments at times almost devout.”
If she was damned by one erratic former Transcendentalist and dismissed by the Unitarian establishment at home, Margaret had been praised in magazines and newspapers from New Orleans to New York City and approved by her closest friends. The book was not in the end “assailed” by reviewers, as she had feared, but instead, she noted gleefully, it “seems to be selling very well” and was “much read.”