Margaret Fuller Page 3

  A glittering city shrouded in “light smokes”: a setting reminiscent of London in the popular novels Margaret was beginning to read and her father to discourage. But Ellen Kilshaw’s England was not London any more than Margaret’s “region” was Old Cambridge or Boston. Ellen had come from Liverpool, and she returned there after an eighteen-month American sojourn, with her last months spent in Cambridgeport—her project, as Margaret was fully aware, the search for a husband. Yet to Margaret’s way of thinking, Ellen brought with her the “atmosphere of European life,” the very stuff of her bookish fantasies: “I saw in her the storied castles, the fair stately parks and the wind laden with tones from the past, which I desired to know.” Ellen Kilshaw, with her “face most fair” and long hair of “graceful pliancy,” was a merging of heroines—a clever yet vulnerable ingénue whose father’s business reversals threatened her chances in the marriage market, and a refined English-style comtesse de Pologne. For Ellen enchanted not just Margaret, but also her parents. Three years after Ellen returned to England, in 1820, Timothy and Margarett would name their fifth child, their second surviving daughter, Ellen Kilshaw Fuller.

  With Julia Adelaide lost to her, the neighbor girls tiresome, and her mother preoccupied, Ellen Kilshaw was “my first real interest in my kind.” My kind? Ellen painted in oils, and she allowed eight-year-old Margaret to watch the pictures “growing beneath her hand.” She played the harp, and Margaret listened as if the sweet arpeggios were “heralds of the promised land I saw before me.” Ellen was a spellbinder—this was Margaret’s kind.

  Ellen Kilshaw beckoned Margaret toward that hazily imagined adulthood promising more than mediocrity, obscurity. Margaret’s days of reading and study now seemed drab to her; she lived for invitations to join Ellen and the other adults on country walks, when she could draw the older woman to her side and stroll hand in hand. Or for Ellen’s visits to the Cherry Street parlor, where Margaret studied Ellen “from a distance” and memorized “all her looks and motions.” She recognized that Ellen had “in its perfection the woman’s delicate sense for sympathies and attractions.” In company, she offered to all a “sweet courtesy” that “hung about her like a mantle,” even as “her thoughts were free”: she could “live two lives at the same moment.”

  Although her recollections of Ellen were written decades after the brief girlhood friendship, the child Margaret had sensed in Ellen the complexities of a lone woman’s life. A man would not need or wish to “live two lives” at the same moment—nor hope to cultivate that “delicate sense” of social alliances forming and re-forming. A man would not have to maintain a “reserve” like Ellen’s, which seemed, significantly to Margaret, the result of “self-possession” rather than “timidity.” Ellen’s virtues were feminine, as were her “accomplishments” in music and art: shown off to admiring friends in parlor and salon, not to strangers in a concert hall or gallery.

  Margaret’s parents observed their daughter’s fascination with Ellen Kilshaw and encouraged her attachment to a woman they also saw as embodying a feminine ideal—the perfection “in all things” that Timothy envisioned for his daughter, who, to his distress, was developing a slouch as her growth spurt worsened a congenital spinal curve, and whose intensive studies had given her a nearsighted squint. “All accomplishments, & the whole circle of the virtues & graces should be your constant aim, my dear child,” he pressed her, and recommended she follow a program of marching through the house banging a drum harnessed to her shoulders, in hopes of improving her posture.

  Although Timothy was educating his oldest daughter to be “the heir of all he knew,” as Margaret would later recall, he was a man of conventional, if not retrograde, views of women. The two impulses warred within him: to cultivate his prodigy-daughter’s mind through the curriculum that had won him entry to Harvard, and to foster conventional, even ultra-feminine behavior, the sort that had drawn him to marry Margarett Crane.

  The same ambivalence caused him, one day in Washington, to pick up Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman—a book that, thirty years ago in England when it was published to great acclaim, had opened the question of equality of the sexes. It was a volume, Timothy wrote to his wife, that now “no woman dares to read, but she should be charged with libertinism,” because the author had been “discountenanced” as a result of her affair with a man “she loved so ardently & would not marry, but had a child by him.” Indeed Wollstonecraft, who’d taken her first lover while living in Paris, drawn there by the spirit of revolution, had conceived two children out of wedlock before dying in childbirth with the second. After reading Vindication, however, Timothy declared he was “so well pleased” he might send home a copy—only to waver yet again as he considered the matter, suddenly worrying that his course of instruction for Margaret had left her lacking “knowledge of household affairs, sewing etc.”

  Timothy Fuller was something of a libertine himself. Fresh out of college and teaching at a young ladies’ academy in rural Leicester, Massachusetts, he’d had no qualms about romancing his students, recording in his diary “delicious hour[s]” spent with one or another of the girls, enjoying “repeated contact of souls through our lips!” He prided himself on being “capable of plurality of loves” and took his time selecting a wife—ultimately settling on a novice schoolteacher, the daughter of a gunsmith in Canton, a country town south of Boston. Just nineteen when they met after crossing paths on the new bridge, Margarett Crane must have reminded Timothy of the “delicious” yet demure young ladies, “well informed, delicate, & amiable,” whom he’d dallied with at Leicester Academy, to the occasional tittering of their less “judicious” classmates. This young bride from a few rungs down the social ladder would certainly acquiesce to his wishes, even if her enchanting looks and greater height set the stocky redheaded Timothy at a physical disadvantage. Little wonder that their oldest child would form the impression that, in most marriages, “the man looks upon his wife as an adopted child.”

  The Crane family, with four daughters to marry off, viewed Timothy’s marriage proposal as a “piece of good fortune,” and Margarett herself thrilled to her husband’s “throbs of ambition,” rarely questioning where they might lead him. If she wasn’t precisely a politician’s wife—did not often entertain his Republican cronies in Cambridgeport, follow him to Washington as hostess-companion, or attempt to influence his legislative agenda—she willingly tended to house and children while he was away and applauded, by letter, whenever he reported having entered into congressional debate.

  Margarett Crane Fuller also found relief in her husband’s regular absences, long months during which she sometimes took the children to stay at her girlhood home in Canton or brought her mother and sisters to Cambridgeport. Timothy, who admitted to a “hasty temper” and could be, as his daughter later wrote, “a tyrant in his home,” was no less hotheaded and tyrannical in the letters he sent to his wife from Washington. Several weeks into their initial separation, after his wife had written that the receipt of his first letters had caused “such an overflowing of joy” that she had rushed upstairs to hide her tears, Timothy wrote back that he loved her “more romantically now than when we were married.” But in other letters he ordered her to write every day, whether or not he reciprocated, charged her with extravagance, and refused her access to funds managed by his brother Abraham, reminding her that “your absent Lord” will be “hold[ing] the purse strings” as long as he wasn’t near enough “to enforce respect for my just command.” More bewildering, Timothy chastised his “disobedient spouse” for imagined “wayward” behavior with “light and frivolous chaps” simply because he’d had a dream in which she’d been riding with another man in a carriage as Timothy walked alongside. “Are our little ones neglected because you are listening to the flatteries & fooleries of fine fellows?” he pestered her. He demanded that she “tell the whole”: “If any thing is suppressed, I shall certainly know it.”

  Timothy worried that his younger
wife would find men of her own age more attractive in his absence and regretted being too far off to have “you in my eye constantly,” as he had walking carriage-side in his dream. Yet he compulsively engaged in the very behavior he was forbidding his wife. He wrote home to her, boasting of a plurality of flirtations in Washington households, often stressing the superior beauty of women of “low stature”—women shorter than she—when compared to those of “Herculean size.” He prattled on about his dinner party infatuations despite her requests that he stop. Even her barbed comment that perhaps he was “envious at the superiority I have over you in size” had no effect. If he had any thoughts of his wife joining him in Washington, she warned, only half teasing, she now had “no inclination” to “exhibit myself” where Timothy would find himself at a “disadvantage.” She was reluctant to appear in society where he had shown himself to be an incorrigible flirt.

  Little wonder that Timothy was powerfully attracted to the “highly cultivated” Ellen Kilshaw and that Margarett Crane was just as powerfully determined to have an equal part in the friendship, her own means of keeping her husband “in my eye constantly.” Both may have felt relief when Ellen’s focus turned out to be their daughter, “so surprising for her years, and [who] expresses herself in such appropriate language upon subjects that most of twice her age do not comprehend.” Ellen had been charmed instantly when Margaret’s passion revealed itself on her first visit to the Fuller home. When Margaret opened the door to Ellen, the girl’s cheeks had “flushed” red, then she scampered to hide behind her parents’ chairs before emerging again to engage the visitor in that “so surprising” conversation.

  Ellen was the first adult besides her parents to take a serious interest in Margaret. It is hard to find a distinct Ellen Kilshaw in Margaret’s overwrought depictions of this woman she claimed to love “better than my life,” but more important, Margaret felt Ellen had found a distinct—the true—Margaret. Ellen saw past the girl’s flushed cheeks to “the lonely child whose heaven she was, whose eye she met, whose possibilities she predicted.” With Ellen, Margaret experienced and never forgot the affirmation that comes when “the voice finds a listener” and is inspired to “more and more clearness.”

  Timothy’s ambitions for Margaret were his own: Margaret must attain the perfect shining image he held in his mind’s eye. Ellen, an emissary from the wider world—“a region of elegant culture and intercourse”—saw and “predicted” Margaret’s own “possibilities”: qualities of mind and spirit that, ironically, would carry her on a quite different route out of obscurity. After several years of tribulations—a broken engagement, a term as a governess—Ellen’s many accomplishments took her to the altar with a socially acceptable Englishman, the Fullers would learn, as they followed their friend’s progress by overseas mail.

  By then, Margaret had recognized something “shallow and delicate” in Ellen’s voice, in Ellen herself. But that was long after Ellen was severed from Margaret on her return to England and the days of “melancholy” and “profound depression” that followed Ellen’s departure. Margaret’s books, her mother’s garden, no longer delighted or consoled. The girl was plagued by headaches, welcomed them because they kept her from studies that now seemed meaningless. She had learned that she needed real companions, “would not be pacified by shadows”—the characters in books and in her imagination. But where would she find true companions in dull, “mesquin” Cambridgeport? “All joy seemed to have departed with my friend, and the emptiness of our house stood revealed.”

  But the Cherry Street house, with a brood of Fuller children, wasn’t empty; it was the tangle of parental disappointments and demands that left Margaret feeling empty. Both lonely and overmanaged, Margaret understood that her father’s plurality of loves in fact was focused on just two females: “In the more delicate and individual relations, he never approached but two mortals, my mother and myself.” She was one of “my pair of Ms,” along with her mother, her father’s possession, his prize. In Timothy’s letters home, read by both wife and daughter, Margaret learned that as the Washington dinner party invitations thinned out, her father spent idle, “effeminate” evenings toying with a lock of her mother’s hair in his rooms. He even admitted that “sometimes I try the memory & judgment of my daughter by questions in chronology, history, Latin &c.” Although he’d taken a stand in Congress against the Missouri Compromise, an early fugitive slave law, and the Seminole War, he was not making a mark in Washington, and the fault was his own. He confided to his wife, “I am rather too indolent or unenterprising for the slight skirmishes . . . & the great questions require too much trouble and thought.” At night, instead of troubling himself over the “great questions,” he dreamed of Margaret practicing the piano—that lesson “she could never play in true time.” Timothy’s attention to his star pupil was intense, even disturbing, in a man who had once so blithely ignored the boundary between romance and pedagogy. Timothy was fanning a rivalry, as he had done in his letters to his wife detailing the charms of Washington’s women. His complex involvement with Margaret elevated her sense of importance in the family, made her want to be “Margaret alone,” surpassing even her mother in her father’s estimation.

  Did Margaret enjoy it when Timothy used a common Latin phrase—O tempora, O mores!—in a letter to his wife, and followed it with a jab—“Sarah Margarett must interpret for you”—that also accorded his daughter the maternal spelling of their shared name? It was from her father that Margaret learned the art of cruel disparagement, and she practiced it first on her mother. When Margarett Crane finally agreed to accompany Timothy to Washington for a term, her daughter advised her to give up thoughts of acting as his secretary. It was not “a very feasible plan,” wrote eleven-year-old Margaret: “I fancy you will be too much engaged besides you do not write half so fast as he can, and are not sufficiently fond of letter writing; do tell my father that I expect some letters from him.” Timothy had his wife’s company for scarcely a month before she returned to Massachusetts—to nurse her two little boys through a case of the measles, to retreat to the quiet fragrance of her garden.

  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”

  “THEY 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.