Margaret Fuller (61 page)

Thoreau returned to Fire Island to learn that a few garments had been recovered: a shift embroidered with Margaret’s initials, a child’s underclothes, a man’s shirt. But there were no more papers to be found anywhere, and Margaret’s manuscript was not among those in the trunk, nor was it in the small portable desk that first mate Davis had retrieved from the passengers’ cabin on Margaret’s instructions. Ellery Channing had stayed behind to help Catherine Hasty dry the contents. Precious letters from Mazzini and Mickiewicz survived, along with Margaret’s correspondence with Giovanni and a slim journal she’d kept in Rome during the early months of 1849, ending just as the siege began. Nothing more. Nothing, until Thoreau stumbled across Giovanni’s guardsman’s coat. He ripped off one button and pocketed it for his return to Concord, its solidity mocking his quest after vanished lives. “Held up,” he would write of the button in his diary, “it intercepts the light and casts a shadow,—an
actual
button so called,—and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me than my faintest dreams.”

A week after the
Elizabeth
foundered off shore, “a portion of a human skeleton,” mutilated beyond recognition by sharks, was reported on the beach, a mile or more from the lighthouse.
Thoreau followed this lead as well, tracing once more on foot the now deserted shoreline until he spied the “relics of a human body,” he later wrote, which had been draped with a cloth, their location marked with “a stick stuck up” in the air. “Close at hand,” he wrote, “they were simply some bones with a little flesh adhering to them,” with “nothing at all remarkable about them.”
He could not make out “enough of anatomy to decide
confidently
” whether the body was “that of a male or a female”—whether Margaret, Giovanni, Horace Sumner, or anyone else.

After so many days of futile searching, Thoreau felt acutely the insignificance of his place in the drama, and “as I stood there [the bones] grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them.” It seemed to the thirty-three-year-old writer, whose early scribblings had passed beneath Margaret’s stern editorial eye, “as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it.”

Margaret’s essay for the
United States Magazine and Democratic Review
recollecting her torchlight tour of the Vatican galleries had just appeared in print, in the July issue. Her concluding lines, describing her recent efforts in Florence to gain entrance to the Church of San Lorenzo for a nocturnal viewing of Michelangelo’s interiors—“I doubt they cannot look grander by one light than another; but I hope to try”
—stood in sharp contrast to the
Tribune
’s account of her last words, as reported by the
Elizabeth
’s cook: “I see nothing but death before me,—I shall never reach the shore.”
But there was no disputing it: Margaret was gone.

“To the last her country proves inhospitable to her,” Waldo Emerson summed up in his journal, perhaps wishing to forget that he had been among the several friends who, unsettled by the surprising course Margaret’s life had taken in Italy, discouraged her return to America. Now he could simply mourn: “I have lost in her my audience.”
Margaret had been his equal in intellect and, since leaving Concord, had bested him in experience. “We are taught by her plenty how lifeless & outward we were,” he had once observed.
“Her heart, which few knew,” he wrote now, adapting an oft-quoted assessment of Margaret’s idol Goethe, “was as great as her mind, which all knew.” Fatherless since childhood, Waldo Emerson had grown up into a life of recurring loss, each death unleashing an inner fury that took the form of months-long depression. The loss of Margaret, his friend, collaborator, and intellectual sparring partner, affected him differently, if still personally, as a shock that warned of his own mortality: “I hurry now to my work admonished that I have few days left.”

Privately, in his journal, Horace Greeley lamented the loss of Margaret’s book—“pages so rich with experience and life,” he conjectured.
Greeley wrote her
Tribune
obituary himself, calling for new editions of her already published work and concluding, “America has produced no woman who in mental endowments and acquirements has surpassed Margaret Fuller.” And he opened up the
Tribune
’s pages to memorial poetry. Christopher Cranch, who had known Margaret in Boston as a member of the Transcendentalist circle and later in Rome, contributed one of the first elegies on a subject that would beguile American poets far into the twentieth century, Robert Lowell and Amy Clampitt among them. Like the other lyrics written in direct response to her drowning and printed in the
Tribune,
Cranch’s “On the Death of Margaret Fuller Ossoli”
expressed unambiguous grief:

O still sweet summer days! O moonlit nights,

    After so dear a storm how can ye shine! . . .

For she is gone from us—gone, lost for ever,

    In the wild billows, swallowed up and lost—

Gone full of love, life, hope and high endeavor,

    Just when we would have welcomed her the most.

But how warmly would Margaret have been welcomed? Her tragic death seemed only to invite further speculation on a topic that had preoccupied Margaret’s friends ever since the news of her secret marriage and child had reached New England. Pondering the question became a form of mourning, a means of reconciling the loss. By August 1, Cary Sturgis Tappan had received a packet of papers sent from Concord containing the accounts that Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau had written up for Waldo. It was like the old days of sharing letters and journals through the mail, but immeasurably sadder. “How characteristic,” Cary decided, had been Margaret’s actions in the crisis: offering her own life preserver to a sailor once she’d resolved not to make a bid for shore, “refusing to part with her child when she could not have saved him.” And even Margaret’s “securing the money about her” was a heart-rending sign of “how much she had felt the need of it.” Someone “who had always been taken care of,” Cary observed, someone like herself, “would not have done so when lives were in danger.”

Then Cary’s thoughts wandered to the now impossible future: “The waves do not seem so difficult to brave as the prejudices she would have encountered if she had arrived here safely.” Margaret, as Cary remembered her, “was always so sensitive to coldness & unkindness, even from strangers.” There was something fitting, even, about the way her life had ended: “Her return seemed like tearing a bird’s nest from a sheltering tree and tossing it out on the waves.” And Cary could not resist a last gibe at her former teacher, a woman she had resented as well as loved. Cary had suffered an early loss—her beloved older brother, knocked overboard by a wayward boom at sea, when she was a girl. Her mother had gone mad with grief. “Why should we all be afraid to lose everything?” Cary asked now, questioning Margaret’s decision to remain on the sinking
Elizabeth
with her husband and son. “It is not sorrow but tedious days that we fear.”
Margaret had deserted Cary too.

Cary had never known Margaret as a married woman, as a mother. Did Cary believe her old friend could have saved herself from death at sea, like some Shakespearean heroine—Viola of
Twelfth Night
or Miranda of
The Tempest,
whose name Margaret had borrowed for her pseudonymous autobiographical sketch in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
? Would this Margaret-Miranda have abandoned husband and child and fought her way to shore, crying out in the voice of the writer, “I must depend on myself as the only constant friend,” proud that she had “taken a course of her own, and no man stood in her way”?
Writing to Cary from London four years earlier, Margaret had reproached the younger woman similarly for giving up her “noble” independence to marry, for failing to “embark on the wide stream of the world” by continuing her work as an artist. And Margaret had been right: Cary was already unhappy in her marriage, already fearing tedious days ahead, a kind of death in life.

Cary had been the one to deliver the terrible news to Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who’d taken up residence with their two young children in a small farmhouse on the grounds of Highwood, the estate the Tappans leased from Sam Ward in Lenox, the property to which Nathaniel would one day give the name Tanglewood in his children’s tales. Nathaniel’s first novel,
The Scarlet Letter,
had been published in early spring, selling out its first edition within ten days and making its author an instant celebrity. But money was still in short supply, and Cary’s offer of the “Red House,” as Nathaniel dubbed the simple cottage—“as red as the Scarlet Letter,” he’d noted with pleasure
—for minimal rent, had been a welcome one, especially as Nathaniel’s book, with its preface satirizing the denizens of Salem’s Custom House, his colleagues until the political spoils system cost him his job the year before, had earned him enemies at home.

After reading the newspaper accounts of the shipwreck that Cary had brought her, Sophia could think of nothing “so unspeakably agonizing as the image of Margaret upon that wreck, alone, sitting with her hands upon her knees—& tempestuous waves breaking over her!” Sophia wished “at least Angelino could have been saved,” she wrote to her mother in Boston, but of Margaret and Giovanni: “If they were truly bound together as they seemed to be, I am glad they died together.” Years before, Sophia had dismissed Margaret’s critique of marriage in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
arguing that unless “she were married truly”—like Sophia—Margaret had no right to pronounce on the institution. Now, however, Sophia felt that “with her new & deeper experience of life in all its relations—her rich harvest of observation . . . Margaret is such a loss.”

But gossip about the Ossoli marriage traveled nearly as fast as reports of the drownings. George Ripley and Waldo Emerson puzzled over the precise meaning of Giovanni’s title, figuring it “is about equivalent to
Selectman
here.”
Sophia Hawthorne’s older sister Mary had heard from Maria Child that Giovanni “was wholly unfit to be [Margaret’s] husband in this country . . . He would have been nothing here—he could do nothing, be nothing, come to nothing, and he would have dragged her down.” Margaret was rumored to have been pregnant with a second child even as her young family’s “only prospect of maintenance was by her pen.” Maria Child guessed that Margaret would have “fully realized” the “unsuitableness of the match” once she’d arrived in America. “When we think of what a laborious and precarious living she would have had to earn,” Mary had concluded, “I think that we may well be thankful that they all went to Heaven together, agonizing and melancholy as the departure was.”

Maria Child’s revelations had gone still further. She told Mary that “she never saw such a craving for affection as in Margaret” and recounted an incident from their days together as journalists in New York City when Margaret had “burst into tears,” confiding that she “feared she should die” if she never had a child. Astonished that “Margaret, with her vaulting ambition was woman enough to say that,” Mary Peabody, now married to the politician Horace Mann and herself the mother of three young boys, wrote to Sophia that “I do not wonder at her marrying the first man who showed devoted love to her even if he were not particularly intellectual.”

“How infinitely sad about Margaret,” Sophia wrote back. She too was convinced now that “if her husband was a person so wanting in force & availibility,” Margaret would have found “no other peace or rest” back in America—“I am really glad she died.”
Sophia had harsh words for the loose-lipped Maria Child as well: “there is a vein of coarseness in her nature, not feminine. I hate reform-women, as a class do not you? I think it is designed by GOD that woman should always spiritually wear a veil, & not a coat & hat.”

But Sophia and Mary’s oldest sister, Elizabeth Peabody, still unmarried, reached a kinder appraisal of Margaret, the woman she once helped find her way in Boston’s literary marketplace, and of her unconventional liaison in Rome. “It was not unpleasant to Margaret’s romantic temperament,” Elizabeth supposed, to have had “this little mystery for a season.”

Sophia Hawthorne’s distaste for “reform-women” signaled a conflict that might have distressed Margaret on her return to America more than any controversy resulting from bringing the diffident, undereducated Giovanni dei Marchesi Ossoli to live with her there. While Margaret was away in Europe, the women’s rights cause she had helped to set in motion with
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
had surged ahead into activism with a first impromptu convention in Seneca Falls, New York, called by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, once a participant in Margaret’s Boston Conversations. The year was 1848, when revolutions swept the Continent. Had Margaret survived the Atlantic crossing in the summer of 1850, she would have been expected to attend the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, scheduled for October in Worcester, Massachusetts. In later years, the president of the convention, Paulina Wright Davis, an anti-slavery activist turned suffragist, recalled having written to Margaret in May of 1850—a letter Margaret never received—asking her to preside over the two-day assembly. “It can never be known if she would have accepted,” Davis admitted, but “to her, I, at least, had hoped to confide the leadership of this movement.”

Instead, when delegates from as far away as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and upstate New York gathered in Worcester on October 23 and 24 to hear Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, and William Lloyd Garrison speak in favor of women’s suffrage and a slate of other reforms, the assembled crowd observed a moment of silence. “We were left to mourn her guiding hand—her royal presence,” remembered Davis.
But aside from William Channing, who served as one of two vice presidents at the convention, these prominent radicals were not Margaret’s comrades. Waldo Emerson had dodged the event, claiming he was hard at work on Margaret’s memorial biography. Speaking at a convention like this one, with more than a thousand participants, had not so far been Margaret’s way of doing business either.