Margaret Fuller (41 page)

Having won the reprieve—and perhaps more—James Nathan had another confession to make. He planned to leave New York City for Europe in June—alone, he implied—to travel and write. “The golden time is passed,” Margaret mourned. The revelation of James Nathan’s “maiden” had not turned her away, but gone was that “feeling of childhood” when Margaret would “creep close to the side of my companion listening long to his stories of things unfamiliar to my thoughts.” Now the news of his imminent departure had “awakened” a “deeper strain”—“an unison,” she hoped.
James Nathan visited Turtle Bay to leave Josey and his guitar with Margaret—he would return for them both within the year, perhaps as early as next autumn—and the gift of a white veil. Surely once, at least, she wrapped herself in the gauzy mantle, which later she draped over the precious bundle of his letters.
She wrote to him, “I am with you as never with any other one. I like to be quite still and have you the actor and the voice . . . I
will
trust you deeply.” She confessed a “timidity” along with the wish to “see you now and borrow courage from your eyes.” She urged him to visit her freely in the days before his departure, to “come unannounced, and depart informally as if
at home.
”
Were they to be married—in all but name? And if so, what kind of marriage?

A return visit to Turtle Bay—announced or not—in mid-April: James Nathan “approached” Margaret “so nearly.” Too near: “I was exceedingly agitated.” In the crisis, Margaret felt his “powerful magnetic effect on me,” but “I had always attached importance to such an act.” And when “it was asked of me”—“I could not.”
James Nathan had propositioned Margaret, pressed himself on her, and “I could not.” The next day she wrote to him, “Yesterday was, perhaps, a sadder day than I have had in all my life. It did not seem to me an act of ‘providence,’ but of some ill demon that had exposed [me] to what was to every worldly and womanly feeling so insulting. Neither could I reconcile myself to your having such thoughts, and just when you had induced me to trust you so absolutely. I know you could not help it, but why had fate drawn me so near you?”

She walked the city streets in tears. It seemed to her, she wrote to James Nathan, as if “the sweet little garden, with which my mind had surrounded your image lies all desecrated and trampled.”
How might the “earth-stain” ever be washed away?
Yet even now she equivocated. She would not blame him: “It seemed the work of an evil angel making you misread a word in my letter.”
The James Nathan of yesterday’s trespass, the man of “force”
who said he saw “‘
the dame
’ in me,”
was not the same man whose “inmost heart” Margaret knew so well—the man of “so much of feminine sweetness and sensibility,” conforming to her law of “common being.”
She wrote to him of herself distantly now, in the third person: an “ill demon” or “evil angel” had prevented James Nathan from understanding “that if Margaret dared express herself more frankly than another it is because she has been in her way a queen and received her guests as also of royal blood.”
A queen not to be “approached so nearly.”

Yet the incident—was it an assault?—made her “crave” all the more “sweet content with thee.”
Margaret pleaded with James Nathan to be “noble enough to be willing to take me as I am”—to love her as a virgin. Abjectly, she offered to assume all blame—it was “myself who have caused all the ill. It is I who by flattering myself and letting others flatter me that I must ever act nobly and nobler than others, have forgot that pure humility which is our only safeguard.” She had, after all, “not been good and pure and sweet enough.” Indeed, James Nathan, his transgression, was “the instrument of good to me.” And “I have now taken the kernel of your life and planted it in mine.”
She quoted Novalis—

No angel can ascend to heaven

till the whole heart has fallen

to the earth in ashes—

And she implored him to “come tomorrow morng without fail.”
Loudly called by passion, she would not “yield”—but she would not yield up James Nathan either.

The year before, as Margaret had struggled to “wean” herself from “close habits of personal relations,” she had reread an old letter from Sam Ward and copied a portion of it into her journal—a passage that had struck her so powerfully on first reading, the sentences had imprinted themselves on her memory almost word for word. The subject was “Platonic affection,” which Margaret had advocated in those earlier days of covenants and constellations—and that Sam Ward admitted he also had once “recognized” as a “possibility” before he’d fallen in love with and married Anna Barker. But, Sam informed Margaret, for “those whose personal experience of passion has been thorough,” who “
have
passed that line” to discover “the existence of a new, vast, and tumultuous class of human emotions,” the physical passions—for these “more experienced” people, “the higher emotions and the passions are apt to be always afterward inextricably commingled.” Platonic affection “is possible,” Sam explained, only “to those who have never passed the line,” whose “personal experience of passion . . . remain[s] comparatively undeveloped.”

“Your views of life and affection are perfectly true to
you,
” Sam had conceded; they may give “brightness to the fancy and earnestness to the thoughts.” Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.”
It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic affection, for connections or covenants that dwelled only in “the higher emotions,” marked her as “undeveloped”—a notion that Margaret, with her credo of self-expansion, could scarcely tolerate. Sam’s words made so profound an impression, she had paraphrased them in “The Great Lawsuit,” writing in her defense of “the class contemptuously designated old maids” that “those, who have a complete experience of the human instincts” often maintain a “distrust” as to whether those who do not “can be thoroughly human.”
A year ago Margaret had read Sam’s letter once more, copied out the passage, and then sealed it up—to “read not again ever perhaps.”
Its contents were too disturbing, Sam’s careful honesty too humiliating, even as Margaret sensed there was truth in his letter too vital to be forgotten.

And now James Nathan had appeared to force the question. Margaret longed for “childish rest and play, instead of all the depths,” she wrote to him; “can it not be again?”
Was the problem that Margaret “was not enough a child at the right time,”
had been “called on for wisdom and dignity long before my leading strings were off”
—“and now am too childish”?

The “new, vast, and tumultuous” carnal emotions, those of an earthier life—should she claim them now? The tulips were blooming in the garden at Turtle Bay, she wrote to James Nathan in early May as he prepared for his voyage, and “the crimson ones seem to me like you. They fill gloriously with the sunlight, and the petals glow like gems, while the black stamens in the cup of the flower look so rich and mystical.” She had gathered two crimson tulips and put them in a vase in her room, but the scent was “almost overpowering.” Margaret was fascinated by two others that she left growing in the garden, “golden ones that have rooted themselves on the edge of a grassy bank.” How had they gotten there? “It was a strange elopement from the regular flower bed”: these flowers “so
vornehm
”—she used the German word for “noble”—so “willing to be wild.”

Was Margaret willing to be
vornehm
in this way, to be wild? In her public life she had followed George Sand’s lead, producing “works which systematically assailed the present institution of marriage and the social bonds which are connected with it,” as Margaret had written approvingly of Sand’s novels in the
Tribune.
But would she follow Sand’s example of breaking bonds in her private life? Margaret argued with herself, back and forth, but could not “get out of the labyrinth,” she wrote to James Nathan. “Your voice awakens a longer echo through the subterranean chambers, yet not long enough to teach me where to go.”

She thought of Psyche, whose story she had recited in the Conversations and recalled now in a letter to James Nathan. Psyche was “but a mortal woman, yet as the bride of Love, she became a daughter of the Gods too.” There had been no “other way” Psyche could learn “this secret of herself.” Had she
not
accepted her lover, “all had been lost, the plant and flower and fruit.”
Was James Nathan godly—was he “Love”? Could Margaret reverse her decision—“I could not”—and become immortal by way of a “thorough” experience of the passions? Margaret herself had just written, in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
that once a woman is “able to stand alone”—as certainly the
Tribune
’s star, healed by Dr. Leger, could boast—“then she will not make an imperfect man her god . . . Then, if she finds what she needs in Man embodied, she will know how to love, and be worthy of being loved.”

At times, “life seems so ful[l] so creative; every hour an infinite promise,—I cannot keep in mind prohibitions or barriers or fates,” she wrote to James Nathan.
Yet there was “so much for me to assimilate and absorb.” Could she not simply “let it rest in me till I grow to the stature of what I feel”?
It was different for James Nathan—“
mein liebste,
”
as she addressed him now—“since you have the secret of this vital energy.”
He revealed to Margaret that he had “carried . . . many poor women across the mire,”
not just the English girl. He “must know” how this vital energy “works in all forms of life, especially in mine”;
“you must always instruct me very clearly”—carry Margaret too across the mire.
But “take it gently, and take me near your heart.”
Then again, no. No. “You have touched my heart, and it thrilled at the centre, but that is all.”

Margaret had become so rattled, she realized, that she’d been addressing James Nathan incorrectly in the feminine. The phrase wasn’t “
mein liebste,
” but “
mein liebster
”—my beloved. Perhaps this was no “mistake,” but rather “an instinct”: Margaret had been “seeking the woman” in him, she proposed.
She resorted to her theory of the “common being”: if both Margaret and James Nathan were beings in which male and female were “perpetually passing into one another,” why need they meet in body? She offered herself to him as “your moon,” your “pure reflection . . . in a serene sky.”
And she copied out for him a verse she had composed at Fishkill Landing, while living peaceably “together and apart” with Cary Sturgis, “To the Face Seen in the Moon”:

. . . if I steadfast gaze upon thy face

A human secret, like my own, I trace,

For through the woman’s smile looks the male eye.

Was this Margaret’s secret, as well as the source of her rallying cry in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
that male and female were united in her? Would carnal love for either man or woman lead to personal dis-union, dis-integration? Was this her fear?

When Margaret read through her 1844 journal in search of the poem, she might have found this entry too, which so accurately described her current crisis: “The Woman in me kneels and weeps in tender rapture; the Man in me rushes forth, but only to be baffled.” The previous fall, as Margaret wrote the final pages of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
she had been more certain of the result she desired: “the time will come, when, from the union of this tragic king and queen, shall be born a radiant sovereign self.”
She was not yet ready to take back her “no” to James Nathan, but she was no longer certain she wanted to become a “radiant sovereign self,” a “queenly” moon, as she referred to the luminous orb that seemed to watch her so closely at night, “to bless so purely.”

For James Nathan she altered the second line of her verse: “A human secret, like
our
own, I trace.”
And Margaret made him promise to keep their secret—“have no confidant as to our relationship! I have had and shall have none. I wish to be alone with you in strict communion.”

Margaret was not as inexperienced as Sam Ward believed. She knew that “we improve most by being loved and trusted and by loving and trusting.”
But Margaret’s own experience warned her of complications, dire ones, that could result from “loving and trusting.” She had made bold claims for women’s equal capabilities in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
yet in the realm of sexual experience, only “men have the privilege of boldness,” she observed to James Nathan.
Women took on all the risk; pregnancy made their private choices public, altered their lives. She had not forgotten the day a young woman died in her arms in a wretched cottage in Groton, the victim of a botched abortion. She had not forgotten her mother’s many pregnancies, albeit in grander homes, or the two that had resulted in deaths of beloved infants. And Margaret herself had only just been released from care for the six siblings who survived childhood. There was life in carnal relations, but also risk of tragedy, of never-ending encumbrance—of relegation to a shadow world in which women like James Nathan’s “English maiden” or the female prisoners at Sing Sing lived.

Margaret gathered farewell gifts—the pen with which she wrote a “last letter”
before his departure, a book of poems by Shelley, the short-lived Romantic renegade whose “magnetic power of genius” she’d extolled in her early
American Monthly
essay “Modern British Poets.”
She offered to secure letters of introduction for James Nathan on his travels—from George Bancroft, Edward Everett, Samuel Gridley Howe. She tried not to be “too sensitive,” as he’d accused her of being when she complained that he’d missed a visit—“it is well we are to separate now,” she attempted to convince herself. And perhaps it was so. James Nathan would not let her come to the docks to say goodbye—“May we meet as we feel!” she wrote instead, looking forward to his return.
Did she suspect what soon turned out to be true, that he had sailed with the “English maiden” at his side? Yet he’d left
her,
Margaret, the white veil.