Margaret Fuller (5 page)

With her mother, Margaret was “impertinent,” begging to be allowed to put aside her household chores—minding the baby, tutoring her brothers—to take that favorite walk across the West Bridge into Boston.
Margaret read her father’s letters home, but she did not read her mother’s to Timothy, wherein she would have found reports of her misbehavior, along with unexpected insights. Margarett Crane Fuller’s philosophy of child rearing could not have been more different from her husband’s, at least when it came to their older daughter. “I see in Sarah M. much to be proud of and much to correct, but I wish above all things to preserve her confidence & affection & not appear to be a severe judge,” she wrote, in an effort to rein in her husband’s criticisms.

Margarett Crane was questioning Timothy’s authority too. “I have long thought that constant care of children narrowed the mind,” she wrote her husband, impatient after a decade of marriage, concerning her household duties when he was away. The plan to join him in Washington had been the result of her challenge: “I intend sometime to leave you in the same situation I am placed in just to see how much real patience and philosophy you possess.”
Had he sent her Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication
? Margarett Crane Fuller was more willful than Timothy had suspected when he had fallen in love with her as a nineteen-year-old he imagined he could shape and control—as he then tried to shape and control their daughter, “to make” of her “a good scholar & a good girl.”

Margarett Crane may have been even more perceptive about the “very uncommon
child,
” as she described her older daughter, the girl she struggled with, who felt unloved, than Timothy was. Had Margaret known that her mother had written this about her to Timothy—“Whenever I find any little scraps of her writing, I find something
original
& worth preserving in them”—would she have felt such emptiness, or sought throughout her life so desperately for validation of her originality, her worth, from other Ellen Kilshaws,
and from other Timothys? Her father’s proprietary vigilance felt like a loss to Margaret: “how deep the anguish, how deeper still the want, with which I walked alone in hours of childish passion, and called for a Father often saying the Word a hundred times till it was stifled by sobs.”

After Ellen Kilshaw’s departure, Margaret would seek other guides to realms beyond Cambridgeport. Yet her memory lingered. Ellen left Margaret a keepsake, “a bunch of golden amaranths or everlasting flowers.” Overpoweringly fragrant, the flowers came from Madeira, Ellen said. Margaret saved them long after she’d grown disenchanted with Ellen Kilshaw, long into adulthood—“‘Madeira’ seemed to me the fortunate isle, apart in the blue ocean from all of ill or dread. Whenever I saw a sail passing in the distance,—if it bore itself with fulness of beautiful certainty,—I felt that it was going to Madeira.”

3

Theme: “Possunt quia posse videntur”

“T
HEY CAN CONQUER WHO BELIEVE THEY CAN
.”
THE WELL-KNOWN
line from Virgil’s
Aeneid
describes a team of rowers who will themselves to win a race. Chosen by Margaret, or by her father, the inspiring words became the starting point for an essay she wrote as a girl. This time Margaret herself saved the manuscript, noting on its final page decades later, “Theme corrected by father; the only one I have kept; it shows very plainly what our mental relation was.”

Yet strangely, few corrections appear from Timothy—that “man of business, even in literature,”
as Margaret later wrote, who “demanded accuracy and clearness in everything: you must not speak, unless you can make your meaning perfectly intelligible to the person addressed; must not express a thought, unless you can give a reason for it, if required; must not make a statement, unless sure of all particulars.”
Timothy’s marks on the handwritten composition—six pages long—are minimal, just a phrase or two deleted, several ambiguous antecedents queried. By now, Margaret had absorbed so many of her father’s views that he found little else to criticize.

This was what she preserved in the manuscript: the implicit presence of her father, both resented and loved, in her thought as a girl. “As nothing more widely distinguishes man from man than energy of will,” Margaret begins, “so can nothing be more interesting than an inquiry into the nature of that enthusiastic confidence in the future which is a chief element of this will.” Surely the forthright statement, an endorsement of democratic striving and Yankee zeal, pleased her father. Timothy suggests that she substitute “energy” for the final word, “will,” for the sake of clarity; and he questions the phrase “in the future.” Timothy’s query teaches Margaret this about her father: he too is anxious. Can the “high scholar,” the striving lawyer and politician, maintain his position by force of will? There is no choice but to summon the “energy” to try.

“Imagination is necessary to this confidence,” Margaret continues; imagination enables us to apprehend beauty and to “enliven our hearts” once we have attained our goals. But imagination “cannot nerve the will to perseverance,” she admonishes her reader (and herself, perhaps), cannot support the “unwearied climbing and scrambling” necessary to accomplishment. Years later, Margaret came to understand that her father “had no conception of the subtle and indirect motions of imagination and feeling,” had “no belief in minds that listen, wait, and receive.” The girl Margaret’s mistrust of the imagination, of
her
imagination, was her father’s.

And “so I must put on the fetters,” she recalled of her unwearying scramble up the hill of knowledge as defined by Timothy: “I had no natural childhood.” At a younger age than Ellen Kilshaw, Margaret learned to live two lives, safeguarding her imagination, her listening, feeling self: “My own world sank deep within.” And that “true life was only the dearer” for being “secluded . . . veiled over by a thick curtain”—not a mantle of courtesy, like Ellen’s, but a mantle of “intellect.”

Most telling of all, “man” is the subject of Margaret’s essay—not generic “mankind,” but
man, not woman.
Napoleon, Michelangelo, Demosthenes, Brutus are her examples of energetic will. “I thought with rapture of the all-accomplished man, him of the many talents, wide resources, clear sight, and omnipotent will,” she recalled of the years spent in her father’s home school.
At age nine she had written a page called “Beauties of Nature,” enumerating the delights of garden, hill, cavern, and sea, concluding, “What employment [is] so noble as that of a naturalist. How must his mind be exalted and ennobled.”

Negative examples, those who falter, are men too: “The
coward
never enters the lists,—the
weakling
failing once never enters them
again.
” “Possunt quia posse videntur” is an essay about the power of the will, confidence in the future, written by an ambitious little girl who has learned that men are heroes, who must imagine herself, though her imagination is suspect, into the forward-looking conclusion she herself has written, a sentence that shows “very plainly” what she has to say on her own, although that sentence excludes her: “It is not in the power of circumstance to prevent the earnest will from shaping round itself the character of a great, a wise, or a good man.”

One sentence allows for an ambiguous subject, neither male nor female, a sentence that speaks of learning from defeat, of redoubled effort: “The truly strong of will returns invigorated by the contest, calmed, not saddened by failure and wiser from its nature.” Margaret has learned to rebound from her father’s criticism; she has, she believes, “too much strength to be crushed.”
Those heroes were not who she could become, but she “loved to conquer obstacles, and fed my youth and strength for their sake,” she would later recall.
It will be many years before that girl envisions womanly valor, attains a “fulness of beautiful certainty”—before she makes her voyage to “Madeira,” bearing her mantle of intellect not as a cloak but as a shield. Always she will strive, manfully, though she is a girl, and later a woman.

Now Margaret’s hidden self spoke, beyond her control. By night she was “a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism.” She dreamed of walking in her mother’s funeral procession, dreams inspired by her reading of the
Aeneid:
“of horses trampling over her,” of “trees that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get out” as the bloody tide rose over her feet, then higher, finally reaching her lips, threatening her ability to speak, to cry for help, to live. She walked in her sleep, moaning, till her father found her, shook her awake, and, when she confessed her nightmare visions, ordered her “sharply” to “leave off thinking of such nonsense.” The man who leveled jealous accusations at his wife on the basis of one dream brushed aside his daughter’s recurring nightmares as nonsense—“never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night” by keeping her up long past any normal child’s bedtime for late-night recitations, by forcing her through Virgil’s lurid battle scenes, by inciting a rivalry between his “
pair
of Ms.”
Finally, to everyone’s relief, Timothy sent Margaret to school.

At nine and ten Margaret walked down Cherry Street and around the corner each day to the newly opened Cambridge Port Private Grammar School with her brother Eugene, now six. There, in an arrangement unusual for the time, boys preparing for Harvard and girls with progressive-minded parents studied together, although seated in separate “classes,” facing each other from benches on opposite sides of the room. Margaret, the girl with “no natural childhood,” who “came with the reputation of being ‘smart,’” as one classmate remembered,
nevertheless made friends with Harriet Fay, one of the few girls on Cherry Street whose parents also favored a classical education for their daughter, and with several other girls who walked the mile and a half from high-minded Old Cambridge or across the river from Brookline and Boston.

Boys noticed her, not always favorably. Young Oliver Wendell Holmes, who found the fair-haired Harriet Fay “a revelation” of feminine charms, remembered Margaret, by contrast, as exhibiting an “air to her schoolmates [that] was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them.” But again, Margaret was justified in holding this view of herself. She had come to school adept in translating Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil, the Latin texts her classmates were studying, and her compositions in English were closely reasoned and distinctive—original, as her mother had noted. The eleven-year-old Holmes chanced on a copy of one of Margaret’s essays and began to read “with a certain emulous interest,” hoping to find that his own written work was better—after all, he was a full year older. Margaret’s essay began, “‘It is a trite remark’ . . . I stopped. Alas! I did not know what
trite
meant.” For the future physician and poet, the evidence of Margaret’s “superiority” was a “crushing discovery.” That Margaret so quickly “got ahead of me” was likely the reason young Holmes derided her “long, flexile neck”—that slouch—and the “aqua-marine lustre” in her squinting eyes.
What the boy didn’t know was that Margaret also kept watch on competitors, usually older ones. When Margaret learned that “Miss Mary Elliot went through Virgil in thirty days,” she determined to study “with renewed vigor.”

But Margaret did not stay long at the Port School, as it was nicknamed by its pupils. Timothy had begun to hear of her “deficiencies” in “female
propriety,
& disposition,” and he wanted a girls’ school for his daughter.
Margaret herself was uncomfortable with her body as it grew more womanly, lacing herself into too small dresses in hopes of containing the feminine flesh, making her seem “very corpulent,” one boy judged harshly.
Once while visiting the house of a school friend, a maid had to be summoned to tighten the corset strings when her dress came undone. Now it wasn’t just her intellect that made her seem much older than she was; it was her body. Entering her teens, Margaret was a “robust” girl who “passed for eighteen or twenty.”

Although her mother argued for a boarding school in suburban Jamaica Plain that emphasized “polite forms of etiquette in social life,” Timothy instead chose, at Margaret’s urging, the most academically rigorous girls’ academy in Boston, Dr. Park’s Lyceum for Young Ladies, a day school across the river on Beacon Hill’s Mount Vernon Street.
There Margaret could continue her Latin and English composition, and add Italian, French, history, geography, geometry and trigonometry, and the natural sciences. As for the social graces, she began lessons at a nearby dancing school, which brought regular invitations to cotillions. Now her love of strenuous exercise had an outlet, and the physically mature girl soon found herself dancing with “grown up gentlemen”—to her parents’ distress.
Might she “display” her “attainments” too soon?
But Margaret felt more comfortable conversing with college men, and even the handful of college professors who sometimes appeared, than with schoolboys.

In the classroom, Margaret gravitated to older girls as well, although less as friends than as objects of the competitive zeal fostered by Dr. Park’s teaching methods: here was an opportunity to “conquer obstacles.” At the end of each week, the student with the highest marks in a particular subject was awarded a medal and became the “head” of that class. A girl who collected twenty-one medals would earn the coveted “eye of Intelligence,” the Lyceum’s highest honor.
Fourteen-year-old Susan Channing, niece of the eminent Reverend William Ellery Channing, had earned an impressive seventeen medals during her three months in the school previous to Margaret’s arrival. But this didn’t stop eleven-year-old Margaret from vowing to take the head in English away from Susan and rack up her own twenty-one in as short a time—and she did.

Once again, a reputation for genius, if somewhat distorted, had preceded her and grew with her accomplishments. Margaret was that “prodigy of talent and accomplishment”
and that “wonderful child at Dr. Park’s school, talking pure mathematics with her father, at 12 years.”
Her forthright manner and awkward appearance may have contributed to another impression circulating: the girl “had not religion.”
Margaret certainly made no effort to exhibit conventional piety in conversation or demeanor; anyone who heard her talk knew that Greek and Roman heroes, not Christian saints, were her lodestars. Her precocious reading of adult novels put her beyond the experience, at least imaginatively, of her peers and even many grown women.