Miss Fuller (17 page)

In the six years since Anne had claimed the desk it had sat on the floor in a corner, under the jumble of things in her work-room. This was formerly the dining-room of the Bratcher homestead, now set up with her easel and paints along with articulated wooden hands and heads; printed model landscape figures of alps, ruined towers, windmills, church spires, ice-bergs, and the like for copying; assorted urns and plaster fruits and dried flowers for her
nature-mortes
. Those specimens of Henry’s that had survived the decades — a dried wasps’ nest, a hundred shells, many seed-pods, a full wood-chuck skeleton, a fox’s skull, and Indian arrow-heads, belts, and baskets — covered the shelves, side-board, and fire-place mantel throughout the room. The Canary-bird they had once rescued was stuffed and perched, along with three New England song-birds, on
a piece of birch-wood in a tall glass bell jar. Sometimes she used these objects in her paintings as well, as emblems held by the subject in a portrait, or on a window-sill in the foreground that opened onto an imaginary landscape.

She did not sell her paintings; those friends who indulged her by sitting received a painting from her as thanks, but she knew not to inquire too closely about whether or not they hung the trophy someplace more prominent than the spare bed-room or the attic. No one had ever offered to pay her for a painting. She still had problems with perspective, but now and then she pleased herself by an illusion of depth. One of her own favorites was a painting with the Canary-bird sitting on the window-sill, the window open and in the distance, an assortment of people, a picnic party laden with baskets and blankets, climbing towards the viewer from the bottom of a yellow and green meadow. Her daughter, loyally, said it reminded her of a painting by Mr. Inness.

A curious incident in that summer of 1882 had prompted her to think of Miss Fuller again. A friend sent her a book with a note — “You knew the
dramatis
personae
, did you not? I hope this will amuse you.” The book, newly published in London, was called
Day-Dreams of the Utopists: The Transcendentalists and Their Legacy
by J. M. Rushworth, described in the preface as “An American Statesman and Home-Spun Philosopher from Virginia.” Rushworth mocked Emerson as the “grand old ostrich of Concord with his head forever in the sand,” “ignorant
of the plain facts of God, commerce and human nature,” a “preacher of the gospel of Himself.” Anne guessed that Mr. Emerson’s death that year had occasioned the book, or perhaps emboldened the press to publish it. The late Mr. Alcott was similarly derided; Mr. Channing, still alive, was barely cited. Though dead, Henry was spared; he was mentioned only as the “half-Red Indian, half-Stoic versifier and shadow of Emerson.” Attacks on William Garrison and Horace Mann — not Transcendentalists at all of course — suggested that the author was chiefly writing a political tract against the Yankee notions of Unitarianism, liberal education, and Abolition, though in the current climate he was not brave or fool enough to attack Abolition directly.

It was in the chapter on Miss Fuller that Mr. Rushworth’s style of invective became most pronounced. She was described as “myopic and a hunch-back,” physically ruined by a father who had forced her to study “like a Medieval scholastick,” love-sick for Emerson
and
Alcott, a “self-declared Sibyl” with “strings of gullible girls and overgrown boys at her feet,” whose
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
was “long-discredited,” who had written “Socialistic propaganda on behalf of the Italian assassins in the pages of the
Tribune
.” She had disgraced her family and friends by a romance with a German Jew in New York, then by “falling into the embrace of the Papacy” in an unproved marriage with “an Italian so-called nobleman, one Ossoli,” who had “been duped into rescuing her from the scandal of
her liaison with Mazzini,” and who was “most certainly not the father” of her “imbecile, and possibly mulatto, child.” Anne learned that Nathaniel Hawthorne had lampooned Miss Fuller in his novel
The Blithedale Romance
, published two years after her death, where she had appeared as a snake-necked sex-goddess of destruction named Zenobia. (Rushworth explained that the historic Zenobia, for whom the character was named, was a fourth-century empress in Palmyra who murdered her husband and child.) Rushworth described the Ossolis’ deaths as “tragic but mercifully swift.”

The chapter ended with an anecdote about Miss Fuller visiting Carlyle in London in 1846. “She approached the great man with a pronouncement: ‘Mr. Carlyle, I am ready to accept the Universe.’ ‘By Gad, woman, you had better!’ he replied.”

Wondering a little about laws of libel —
could
one libel the dead? — Anne of course thought of the desk and its letter. She recalled that she had learned of Mr. Hawthorne’s death several years ago, but was Mrs. Hawthorne still alive? Wouldn’t her sister Sissy have taken care of that detail, assuming she had noticed to whom the letter was addressed?

Anne wrote to an old family friend, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, at his Boston church. Did he know if Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was alive and where she lived? Mr. Clarke’s reply arrived: Mrs. Hawthorne had died, more than five years ago, in London. He was delighted to hear
from Anne, he said; and could he be of further assistance in her inquiries? She sensed she had pricked his curiosity; but instinctively she did not wish to confide in him. Feeling brave and a little reckless, she wrote instead that she was simply widening her education, and asked if he would write her a letter of introduction so that she might use the library at Harvard.

In September, Anne ventured into Cambridge on the train. The sound of a bell boomed the hour as she entered the Harvard Yard. Flocks of gowned young men burst from the doorways and swirled about under the trees, jostling her and then apologising with exaggerated courtesy. She threaded her way through more men up the steps to Gore Hall. At the front desk she handed over Mr. Clarke’s letter for the inspection of a gloved attendant; he rang a bell and murmured to a much less elegantly dressed fellow with a clerk’s swaddled coat-sleeves, who fetched another just like him. Flanked by these two, she was ushered past a card catalogue, where worked what looked like a dozen women in aprons, to the Reading Room. At a table in an alcove, under the amused, or simply curious, or even outraged eyes of many men, young and old, she spent the afternoon. The librarians whispered suggestions and retrieved items. Carefully she looked into books — the two volumes of the
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli
(selections of Fuller’s writings, with essays by Emerson and others), a posthumous edition of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
, a collection of
the
Tribune
columns from Europe. She noticed from the fly-leaves that none of these had ever been borrowed from the library by any Harvard students. She had brought a note-book and short pencil that fitted into her reticule — with these she took notes without being sure what would be helpful. She wrote down:
No one reads her work. Memoirs: Ed. by Emerson, Clarke, Greeley, Channing. Henry quoted but did not contribute. Emerson quotes Carlyle as saying that MF had “a high-soaring, clear, enthusiastic soul.”

One of the librarians brought her a sharper pencil.

To page through the old newspapers and journals, bound in great flat green and black leather boards, like atlases, she had to stand up and lean over the table. She saw, on the front pages of the
Tribune
from the 1840s, that Miss Fuller’s account of the events of the Italian revolution ran down the right-hand column, and that she was often paired with another
Tribune
correspondent, the German writer Karl Marx, whose columns ran next to hers. Both wrote about the war: Miss Fuller from Rome, about day-to-day events; Mr. Marx from various other European capitals, where he reported on what others thought of the war and something he referred to as “the international workers’ struggle.”

As well as contemporary reviews of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
, she also found some lines that mocked Miss Fuller, in a longer work in verse called “A Fable for Critics,” by James Russell Lowell. It had been published while Fuller
was in Europe. In a firm set-down, Lowell said that she stole the ideas of others, that she was spiteful, and that she wrote with “an I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air.” Anne tried to remember where she had seen Lowell’s name already — ah, yes, in that article by Miss Fuller called “American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future.”

Her back ached from leaning over the table. She asked one of the librarians to find Fuller’s original article, and after some time he returned. She resumed her stance. It had been in the
Tribune
. Oh. Well. Miss Fuller sounded as if she had every right to her opinions. She sounded very learned, in fact. And not at all spiteful — generous, rather, and hopeful even for work she did not like. Ah — here was James Russell Lowell’s name, alongside Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s. Miss Fuller decidedly did not think that the future of a new American poetry lay in their hands; Longfellow parroted the works of others, and Lowell was, she wrote, “absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poetry.”

Anne put a little note in her book:
She made everybody angry
.

Bewildered by the size of her task, she leafed through bound copies of
The Dial
magazine; half of its pages seemed to have been written by Miss Fuller. In her note-book, she listed some subjects:
American Painters; New Poetry; Poverty; the American Indians of the North-West
.

She read accounts of the ship-wreck, several obituary
notes, and the essays and reviews that accompanied the publication of the
Memoirs
. In Boston the writers were kind; in New York and farther afield, they were less so. She knew she was not imagining it: Here was that same feeling she had been surprised by so many years ago, when Miss Fuller had died. Everyone was —
relieved
. Not actually glad that she was dead, perhaps. But surely relieved, relieved of the burden of this impossible woman. Relieved that they no longer would have to read her exhortations to do good, to send money, to think more broadly, to consider the poor and the powerless, to worry over their place in history, to follow her difficult sentences, to wonder if women after all should be allowed to pester them in this way, and to do such things as Miss Fuller did and imagined.

She made everybody angry. Such a terrible talent.

Flanked closely by two ushers to the door, as if she were a horse that might rear in traffic, Anne stepped out into a misty evening. As she had been reading, the world had been transformed into softness and muddle, and the eye was drawn to small patches of clarity where the gas-lamps lit the paths. How could one reclaim the private person one had known, even if only a little, in the midst of the clamor and eloquence of public opinion and reminiscence? She concentrated very hard on her own few memories; she summoned up her own words. Under the lamp-light at the Yard gate, she wrote in her note-book:
More alive than anyone else
. And then:
She frightens me
.

The day following her Harvard visit Anne drove her pony-cart to the public library in Concord, to borrow
The Blithedale Romance
, the novel of Hawthorne’s she had learned was supposed to be about Miss Fuller. Not much of a novel reader as a rule, she struggled at first to understand what was fantasy, what was allegory — since clearly the narrator was meant to be a figure for Hawthorne himself, and Blithedale was like Brook Farm, in Roxbury, where Hawthorne had briefly joined his many friends in the early 1840s to run a communal farm on noble principles. (She remembered Henry’s muted horror at the scheme — or perhaps just at the very idea of living with that particular company — and remembered also that Miss Fuller had not joined them either, as she was too busy elsewhere.) The very disclaimer from the author at the start of the book was, Anne surmised, a kind of code: I’ll say this is
not
Brook Farm, that these characters are
not
based on figures from real life, and by my so saying you will understand the reverse. Anne could not make out who the powerful, sinister Westervelt and Hollingsworth were meant to be exactly — the Reverend George Ripley, who founded Brook Farm? Mr. E? Alcott? — but she was pretty sure that the feeble and pretty Priscilla was a sort of Sophia Peabody (loved by the narrator) and that Zenobia, despite her “dark” hair, was Miss Fuller.

Named for that powerful queen of ancient history, Zenobia of Palmyra, who murdered her husband and son, this
Zenobia of Hawthorne’s imagination was beautiful and mesmeric, rich and richly dressed, preaching a doctrine of female emancipation although she herself longed only for a man’s love, hiding an illicit marriage, enchanting the narrator and Priscilla and everyone around her — and then bringing destruction, mostly upon herself. She committed suicide by drowning at the end of the novel.

Anne pondered these things, and returned to her notes to write:

Mr. H. wrote the novel soon after MF died; and it is filled with love and hate. He is unjust in his portrayal of her as idly rich, as she surely was not. He also believed his wife, “Priscilla,” was in her power. Did he suspect Sapphic tendencies? (Good heavens.) Do novelists do this often, kill a person a second time? Would he have been happier if Miss F
had
committed suicide? Did he somehow imagine she had? But how can a ship-wreck be suicide? Does he suggest by giving her the name “Zenobia” that she murdered her husband and son? Did he confuse her power with the power of the weather itself? The goddess of hurricanes
.

In any case, thought Anne, Miss Fuller had certainly occupied Hawthorne’s imagination.

At last, not sure if she should, less sure of everything than she had been even before her researches began, the next morning, at dawn, almost as if she were ceremoniously opening a tomb of the Pharaohs, she took a file and broke open the desk lock. The interior still smelled, sharply, of the sea. She touched a button, a drawing-pin, three tiny buds dried on a knobbly stem — she recognized the plant,
Amaranthus graecizans
, or was it
virids
? — a clam shell no bigger than her smallest fingernail, some fine sand. She smiled and thought,
Amaranthus fulleris
.