Margaret Fuller Read online

  Both parents were eager to send Margaret away from the city, where, despite having been “disappointed” by her farewell party, as she finally admitted to her mother, Margaret continued to attend cotillions, dancing with Harvard men—George Ripley and Edward Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s younger brother and cousin to George B. What if his daughter were to “cheapen her value by too frequent appearance in company,” Timothy worried. “She certainly begins to think herself a Lady among the Beaux,” her mother had written to Timothy, disturbed by a parlor scene in which thirteen-year-old Margaret had refused the polite request of an attentive young schoolmaster, Mr. Frost, to see some of her writing. “He looked surprised & I was amazed at the girl’s daring. What do you think of such a beginning?” Margarett Crane asked.

  Margaret had no choice but to agree to a summer at Miss Susan Prescott’s school in rural Groton, Massachusetts, the same small town where Timothy had been born. His father, a stubborn-minded minister turned politician, had refused to vote in favor of the U.S. Constitution because the document had not banned slavery. Being “too independent” was a Fuller family trait. “I hope you will not keep me there very long,” Margaret wrote plaintively to Timothy, reminding him that if she stayed at school through the fall, she would “not see you the whole year round” because of his term in Washington. Once Margaret had acquiesced, Timothy sent her a hymn to the virtues of Susan Prescott, daughter of a prominent judge: the “judicious country lady, who will be free & faithful in watching & correcting your faults, & in imparting a relish for rural scenes, & rural habits, & rural society,” which would “contribute immensely to your immediate worth, & to your permanent happiness.” After he had made his firstborn “the heir of all he knew,” he now was determined to turn her into a demure country miss, as her mother had been when he met her. In the end, Margaret stayed in Groton a full twelve months.

  As Timothy’s political aspirations reached a plateau, his concern for Margaret’s future—the match she might make—deepened. Yet her immediate happiness troubled him too. Familiar with the stinging slights of judgmental schoolgirls, Timothy hoped Miss Prescott’s academy would offer Margaret “a fair opportunity to begin the world anew, to avoid the mistakes & faults, which have deprived you of some esteem, among your present acquaintances.” Margaret must have shared the same hope as she boarded the stage, chaperoned in her father’s absence by her uncle Elisha, for the six-hour journey over thirty miles of rutted roads leading north and west of Boston in May of 1824, two weeks before her fourteenth birthday.

  Nestled in a verdant landscape that Margaret never mentioned in her letters to Timothy, Miss Prescott’s academy at Groton was not a school for scholars, despite its extensive offerings: “Orthography, Reading, Poetry and Prose, Writing, English grammar; Geography, ancient and modern, Arithmetic, Projection of Maps, History, Composition, Rhetoric, Logic, Natural and Intellectual Philosophy, Geometry, Astronomy, Chemistry, Botany, French Language,” as advertised in a Boston newspaper the month before Margaret arrived. “I feel myself rather degraded from Cicero’s Oratory to One and two are how many,” Margaret wrote her father after just a few days, reporting that the texts assigned to her were standard volumes in rhetoric and logic, plus Warren Colburn’s “Arithmetick.” She wished he would write to Miss Prescott, “for I do not know myself exactly what were your wishes with regard to the course of my studies,” she tweaked her once vigilant father. The strongest indication of Timothy’s turnabout in guiding Margaret’s development was his apparent lack of interest in her academic program at this last stop in her formal schooling.

  But Miss Prescott, whom “I did not intend to like,” Margaret admitted, turned out to be a woman “I really love and admire.” The lessons she would learn at boarding school—in matters “those who had sent her forth to learn little dreamed of”—had nothing to do with the intellect. The most profound of them came from that “judicious country lady” whose nurture of her wayward pupil would have surprised the exacting Timothy, had he learned of it. Many years later, Margaret turned the episode into a fictional piece, representing herself as Mariana, a girl who had “been unfortunately committed for some time to the mercies of a boarding-school.” The story has the flavor of a Charlotte Brontë novel, although both Margaret’s experience at the school and her telling of it anticipate Shirley and Jane Eyre by decades.

  Mariana is different from the other girls—she is “on the father’s side, of Spanish Creole blood.” Mariana’s unusual paternal inheritance makes her a “strange bird” at the school, “a lonely swallow that could not make for itself a summer,” just as Margaret’s uncommon education by her father set her apart as a scholar when she arrived at Miss Prescott’s. One can assume that with Margaret, as with Mariana, the other girls immediately recognized her “touch of genius and power.” The story makes no mention of Mariana’s mother; Margaret’s own mother was likely preoccupied when she left for school: within days of her daughter’s departure Margarett Crane gave birth to a fourth son, Richard.

  At first Mariana is an enchanting figure to her schoolmates—“always new, always surprising, and, for a time, charming.” The other girls are “captivated” by her trick of spinning in circles till her onlookers are “giddy” with watching, then pausing to tell stories woven from “the scenes of her earlier childhood, her companions, and the dignitaries she sometimes saw, with fantasies unknown to life, unknown to heaven or earth”—which bring her schoolgirl audience to laughter or tears. With her gift for theater, Mariana is chosen for the lead in school plays, where she shines “triumphant.” But there is “a vein of haughty caprice in her character,” along with a “love of solitude,” which annoy and perplex the other girls. She refuses to join in their gossip and flouts the “restraints and narrow routine” of the school. She soon gains a reputation as a “provoking non-conformist” who is “always devising means to break” rules: feigning headaches in order to skip tedious mealtimes or simply dallying on an upstairs balcony, “gazing on the beautiful prospect,” when the dinner bell rings.

  Mariana takes to wearing her stage makeup on schooldays, dipping into “her carmine saucer on the dressing table” each morning to paint her cheeks, and the other girls, once tolerant of her eccentric dress—“some sash twisted about her, some drapery, something odd in the arrangement of her hair”—finally begin to tease her for it. Mariana persists in the habit, at first saying she likes to “look prettier” and then responding with silence. The detail has the ring of painful truth, as if Margaret, not nearly so reconciled to being “bright and ugly” as she’d vowed, had adopted the same routine herself at Miss Prescott’s, wishing to cover her acne. One day at dinner, Mariana looks up from her plate to see that the other girls have all painted large circles of rouge on their cheeks; they laugh at her down the table as teachers and servants look on with barely suppressed giggles.

  Mariana maintains her composure through the meal, relying on her “Roman” spirit to carry her through the ordeal. But she collapses in hysterics afterward in her room, only to rise up transformed. She cannot forget that not one of her former companions took her side by refusing to take part in the prank. Her outward “wildness, her invention” are gone, replaced with somber studiousness and a sudden interest in the other girls’ gossip, which she cleverly manipulates until those who have wronged her are consumed with jealousy and spite. She has become a “genius of discord” rather than a genius of the imagination. And then she is found out, accused—rightly, she admits—by the older girls of “calumny and falsehood.” The “passionate, but nobly-tempered” Mariana throws herself on the floor, dashes her head against the iron hearth in shame. She knows that by seeking vengeance she has committed a greater wrong than those who injured her first.

  It is left to the headmistress to calm and console Mariana—and she does so as Ellen Kilshaw might have: by expressing complete sympathy and confiding errors from her own youth. “Do not think that one great fault can mar a whole life,” she exhorts Mariana. The gir
l is changed again, “tamed in that hour of penitence”: “The heart of stone was quite broken in her. The fiery life fallen from flame to coal.” Mariana asks her schoolmates’ forgiveness, and they accept her as a “returning prodigal.” She emerges from this “terrible crisis” as one who “could not resent, could not play false.”

  Although Margaret’s account of Mariana is fictional, it derives from genuine suffering Margaret endured but never revealed to anyone outside the school. Five years after she left Miss Prescott’s academy, she was still writing to her teacher of “those sad experiences,” which continue to “agitate me deeply.” And still grateful to Miss Prescott, “my beloved supporter in those sorrowful hours.” Her memory of “that evening subdues every proud, passionate impulse,” Margaret wrote: “Can I ever forget that to your treatment in that crisis of youth I owe the true life,—the love of Truth and Honor?”

  Margaret’s tale of Mariana has many elements of popular morality tales of the time: a high-spirited, nonconforming girl is “tamed,” inducted into womanhood and its gentler ways. Yet Margaret’s story has a twist. Mariana’s “fiery life” may have “fallen from flame,” but it is not extinguished: the embers remain, banked coals that burn steadily or may be reignited. The lesson she learns is not submission but perseverance when faced with ill will, and authenticity: she “could not resent, could not play false.” These are the qualities Margaret thanks Miss Prescott for in her letter: “the love of Truth and Honor.”

  Whatever transpired at Groton, and between Susan Prescott and Margaret Fuller, left the girl stronger and steadier of purpose when she returned home for her fifteenth birthday. Margaret’s first letter to Susan Prescott from Cambridgeport told of following a rigorous course of language studies—reading French and Italian on her own for several hours each day, morning classes in Greek—along with metaphysics, piano practice, regular walks, and evening journal writing. “I feel the power of industry growing every day,” she wrote, driven by the “all-powerful motive of ambition.” If Timothy had hoped that a year at boarding school would help focus Margaret’s sights on the domestic sphere, he was wrong. “I am determined on distinction,” she confided in Miss Prescott, “which formerly I thought to win at an easy rate; but now I see that long years of labor must be given.” But she would not be one of those “persons of genius, utterly deficient in grace and the power of pleasurable excitement.” Rather, “I wish to combine both.” She was still the Margaret who yearned for power and influence, and for someone to share it with—who, as she wrote Miss Prescott again three years later, was capable of feeling “a gladiatorial disposition” along with “an aching wish for some person with whom I might talk fully and openly.”

  • II •

  CAMBRIDGE

  Margaret Fuller, sketch by James Freeman Clarke

  James Freeman Clarke, sketch by his sister, Sarah Freeman Clarke

  The Dana mansion, Cambridge

  5

  The Young Lady’s Friends

  IT WAS BACK IN CAMBRIDGE THAT MARGARET ENCOUNTERED the “dignitaries” she later wove into her story of Mariana. She had been away at Groton in August of 1824 when the marquis de Lafayette arrived in Boston at the start of a triumphal American tour, which drew grateful crowds to roadsides everywhere he passed. Now, in June of 1825, the aged hero of the American Revolution was back in the city again, preparing for his return to France, and Margaret was allowed to tag along with her parents to an opulent reception hosted by Boston’s mayor, Josiah Quincy. The fifteen-year-old girl insisted on making her own introduction, by way of a letter composed earlier that same day.

  “I expect the pleasure of seeing you tonight,” Margaret began. Though she admitted to being only “one of the most insignificant of that vast population whose hearts echo your name,” she could not “resist the desire of placing my idea before your mind if it be but for a moment.” The idea of Margaret Fuller: already she sensed herself to be a significant personage, as much idea in the minds of others as reality to herself. She wished to tell him, “La Fayette I love I admire you”; and she wanted him to know how much his example inspired in her “a noble ambition.” This was a fan letter, and an “ardent” one (the word peppered her letters now), but self-deprecation had vanished by the closing line: “Should we both live, and it is possible to a female, to whom the avenues of glory are seldom accessible, I will recal my name to your recollection.”

  Whether her letter reached Lafayette in time, or whether Margaret managed the personal encounter she hoped for, is not known and does not finally matter. What matters is this: even at fifteen Margaret could not contemplate glory without placing herself in its presence. Yet she had also begun to confront the inevitable difference between her future prospects and those of a similarly talented, nobly ambitious boy. Was it “possible to a female” to wield power? And if so, how?

  Contemplating the heroic example of the Greeks in an essay written for her father was one thing: They can conquer who believe they can. She could imagine herself into that earlier world as, perhaps, an Amazonian warrior, or even as a member of Aeneas’s crew. Margaret’s mind could take her anywhere; she delighted, she wrote to her teacher Susan Prescott, in being “translate[d]” through her reading or in daydreams to “another scene,” where she became absorbed, “to tears and shuddering,” by the “spirit of adventure.” Most recently she had become immersed in the novel Anastasius, which “hurls you,” alongside its protagonist, “into the midst of the burning passions of the East.” But at a formal social occasion for a living hero of her own day, the ritualized behavior and dress—the stark differences between dark-suited men and puffy-sleeved, corseted women as they sat at table, gathered after dinner in separate rooms—must have seemed incontrovertible evidence of feminine constraint. Was there “pleasure” to be had in Lafayette’s company that night for a girl like Margaret, who wished herself—willed herself—onto the avenues of glory with the likes of her hero?

  The following year, in support of Timothy’s ambitions for himself and for Margaret—could they be separated?—the Fullers moved into the former home of Chief Justice Francis Dana, giving up their drab Cambridgeport house for a grand Georgian residence perched on a terraced hillside in Old Cambridge, a quarter of a mile east of the Harvard campus. With a private drive leading up from the road to Boston across spacious lawns dotted with specimen fruit trees, the Dana mansion offered an expansive view over the Charles River, “so slow and mild,” Margaret wrote. From her second-story window she could see all the way to the “gentle” Blue Hills of Dedham in the south and to Mount Auburn in the west, which glowed in the late-afternoon sun beyond the slate rooftops of Harvard’s handful of classroom and dormitory buildings. The prospect was far superior to the Cambridgeport soap works, which her four-year-old brother Arthur, lording it over the two younger Fuller boys, Richard and the new baby, Lloyd, in the nursery at Dana Hill, mischievously claimed to miss.

  But the greater luxury only highlighted Margaret’s increasingly ambiguous position in the family as she neared adulthood. What was she to do with her prodigious learning and restless ambition? At sixteen, she was now the eldest of seven Fuller siblings, with the cherubic six-year-old Ellen her only sister. Had she been a boy, Margaret would have begun classes at Harvard. Instead she was required to start the little ones on their first lessons and hear daily recitations from Eugene and William Henry, ages eleven and nine, while pursuing an ambitious self-imposed curriculum of her own devising. Most days she made time for Greek and Italian language study, French philosophy and literature, and piano practice—all preparation for an only dimly foreseeable future in which marriage was the sole achievement expected of her, but the last thing on her mind. No wonder she allowed the rosy sunset over Mount Auburn to draw her attention away from Harvard’s imposing brick and stone campus: she could never walk those avenues of glory as a scholar or, as might one day have been appropriate to her talents, professor.

  Timothy Fuller had quit representing the Middles
ex district of Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress, where he’d never gained influence, and turned to state politics, swiftly becoming speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. His law practice, which thrived now that he was in residence year-round, paid the bills for the Dana estate. But Timothy wanted more: a diplomatic posting to Europe under the new administration of John Quincy Adams. And he encouraged Margaret to expect a Continental finish to her education.

  Scarcely a month after the move from Cambridgeport, Timothy used the Dana house to press his case, hosting a lavish dinner dance in the president’s honor. The event promised to be the first Fuller social success, erasing the memory of Margaret’s failed midwinter ball several years earlier, and even afterward it was said to have been “one of the most elaborate affairs of the kind” since pre-Revolutionary days. But Timothy too was forced to count his extravaganza a failure. Adams, still mourning the death of his father, the first President Adams, two months earlier, left before the dancing began and never did offer Timothy Fuller a place in his diplomatic corps. The gala came to seem another case of ill-advised merriment; there would be no more balls in the capacious Fuller home.

  If Timothy had hoped his older daughter would display herself as an appealing commodity on the marriage market that night, he was disappointed in this also. At least one young woman present found Margaret unchanged from the days of her catastrophic dancing party, describing her at the Adams ball as “a young girl of sixteen with a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her head.” Margaret had laced herself too tightly, “by reason of stoutness,” and she wore “a badly cut, low-necked pink silk, with white muslin over it.” Her dancing was awkward too, the result of being “so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner.”