Margaret Fuller (13 page)

Margaret’s ambivalence silenced her. She knew James had made a difficult choice. He too would have preferred to stay near Boston, but there were few ministerial openings in New England. Most of the brilliant young Harvard men Margaret had known had been “disappointed and tortured” as they surveyed a diminished job market before deciding to leave for the West; Henry Hedge would land the closest, in backwoods Bangor, Maine.
Margaret had been “prepared” to see James “never estimated as you deserved, to see the results of all your efforts imperfect.”
Some part of her wished to continue seeking and
not finding
with James. At the moment of parting, which she feared might signal “the breaking up of our intimacy,” she willed herself to assert the intellectual superiority they had both acknowledged long ago by positioning herself as one who could
bless
the newly minted minister.
But she could not get the words out.

She wrote them instead, a crisp farewell augury, in her first letter to James at Louisville—“you are gone and you will prosper”—and then worked to regain an equal footing. “We must I think be both of us quite grown up now,” she proposed.
But if James had become a man, what was she? No nun, but still living at home as a disgruntled “grown-up daughter,” still playing “Margaret Good child,” her own self-mocking appellation.
She struggled to find words to measure being “grown up” in a woman like herself, a woman of genius but, as James had recognized, with “no sphere of action.”
The measure would have to be internal; her metaphors became tangled as she sought a meaningful way to chart her inward progress. “I feel as if my characte[r] had taken its tone,” she claimed, “and as if there might be ornaments added and wealth accumulated there or the reverse but as if the fabrick was now shaped into proportion and its altar dedicated.”
Was she singer or seamstress, banker or bride—or vestal virgin?

From nine hundred miles away in Louisville, where he had been confronted instantly with fire-and-brimstone resistance to his Romantic theology when a half-dozen church women walked out on one of his first sermons, James could say it outright. “You envy me my situation without which your powers are useless,” he wrote to Margaret. “I envy you your abilities without which I cannot fulfill the demands of my situation. You are the Bengal tiger confined in a cage to leap over a broomstick for the amusement of staring clowns. I am a broken-winged hawk, seeking to fly at the sun, but fluttering in the dust.”

James urged Margaret to keep a journal of daily life and send it to him; he would do the same in return. She refused, then wished she’d done it, telling him, “Now that I have lost you I think of you constantly.” She took her reading down to Hazel-grove and held “imaginary conversations” with James about poetry and novels, and wrote it all in “foolishly frank uninterpreted letters,” proposing, “Let us be free in friendship.”
Long-distance, through the mail, she would be free with James as she could be nowhere and with no one else, now that “there is no escaping from the dust and weariness and burden of this state of seclusion—‘Free?’—Vain thought!”
As for friendship in her state of exile, she had concluded that “my heart has no proper home only can prefer some of its visiting-places to others.”

And visit she did, taking the stage to Cambridge to stay with the Farrars when Timothy granted her liberty to “lay on the shelf books needles and children.”
She made a first trip to New York City with James’s widowed mother and his sister, Sarah, an aspiring landscape painter. They toured art galleries, and Margaret deepened her acquaintance with the enchanting Anna Barker, meeting her for the first time on her home turf. Best of all, in the young metropolis Margaret “collected quantities of those most desirable articles new ideas.”

Back home, as winter came on, her father’s despotism crested in the “
icy
seclusion of Groton”; he insisted the younger children adopt his routine of morning ice-water baths and made the boys run barefoot with him in the snow for exercise.
In the evenings, though, he revived some of the Old Cambridge gentility, asking Margaret to read Jefferson’s letters along with him in preparation for his historical work. “I rejoice,” Margaret wrote of the shared project; “all my other pursuits have led me away from him.”
The collaboration brought a respite from Timothy’s exacting command; the best she’d been able to say of her dealings with him in recent months was that “my Father has not once seemed dissatisfied with me.”

But what Margaret really wanted to do was study and write her own work—to “try my hand at composition,” she admitted to Amelia Greenwood.
Once the idea of becoming a writer had rankled, but now she understood—as James Clarke had foreseen—that publication was her best and possibly only means to deliver her opinions and exert her will beyond her circle of intimate friends. She may also have taken her father’s sudden decision to turn into a man of letters as a gauntlet thrown down. Why should Timothy entertain any greater expectation of literary success than she? Here was a chance to compete with—and perhaps exceed—the man whose pedagogical tyranny she had both thrived on and suffered under, who had made her “the heir to all he knew,” instilling in her a child’s restless will to surpass the father.

To James she confided plans to read “ten-thousand, thousand things this winter”: history, geography, the principles of architecture, more Goethe and Schiller.
She was drawn to philosophy, which, she wrote, quoting Novalis, “is peculiarly home-sickness; an overmastering desire to be at home,” and religion, where she hoped to find “a system” of belief “which shall suffice to my character.” The epiphany she reached after fleeing the Thanksgiving church service the year before had not sustained her: “I wish to arrive at that point where I can trust myself, and leave off saying, ‘It seems to me,’ and boldly feel, It
is
so to me.”

She began drafting sermons. Maybe if she tried setting down her views, she could persuade herself of them. And she told James about them: could she have hoped he’d deliver her sermons in Louisville? Writing from a biblical text he’d also used, she teased James that she could do as well as or better than he.
But in the end she was dissatisfied. Instead of unfolding spiritual lessons, she “could only write reveries,” Margaret explained to James, and threw out the drafts.
Writing sermons with no particular audience in mind, with no prospect of delivering them herself, was bound to lead to frustration. The experience of being shut out from the ministry fed her religious doubt; confronting exclusion so directly was painful.

She tried essays next, submitting them to the
Christian Examiner,
the prestigious Unitarian journal that had solicited James’s speech at graduation from Harvard Divinity School the summer before—only to see them turned down. She finished her translation of Goethe’s
Tasso
and sent it to James, who was enthusiastic. But the prospect of publication, offered initially through a connection of Eliza Farrar’s, vanished.
She’d let herself hope she might put her facility with languages to use in translating for an income, but the scheme now seemed untenable, especially as she so far lacked the brazenness to “walk into the Boston establishments and ask them to buy my work.” Here, “I have no friend at once efficient and sympathizing,” she wrote in a letter asking James to try publishers in the West on her behalf.
Women writers frequently leaned on a male relative or friend to handle such negotiations, and then, in order to show a properly feminine lack of ambition, claimed in a preface to have had publication pressed on them. But James could perform no such magic in a territory where most residents didn’t even know the German Romantic writers well enough to despise them, he explained.

The question nagged—what was she to become? Margaret liked encouraging James in his vocation—he’d written to thank her for the inspiration of her “onward spirit”—so long as she didn’t think too hard about the disparity, her sense that “your progress is vast compared to mine.”
Perhaps she should accept that she was meant simply “to feed” James’s “intellectual burner with pine chips,” as she proposed in a letter. There might even be some distinction in an indirect path to power. “Was I not born to fill the ear of some Frederick or Czar Peter with information and suggestions on which he might reflect and act”?

After more than a year at Groton, her situation had changed little, except that seventeen-year-old William Henry returned for a brief stint in her classroom before departing to the West Indies to seek his fortune. When he left, she added three village children to her home school, receiving a small income of her own. “Earning
money
—think of that,” she wrote to James. “I shall be a professional character yet.” Perhaps she could save enough eventually to support a trip to Italy. But the excitement of “beginning to serve my apprenticeship to the world,” as she half-jokingly described her experiment in wage earning, faded as a second Groton winter approached: “Life grows scantier, employments accumulate,” and “I feel less and less confidence in my powers,” she wrote to James.

The sense of being unmoored, of not belonging wherever she went, persisted. “I am more and more dissatisfied with this world, and
cannot
find a home in it,” Margaret confided to Almira Barlow, recently married to a minister in Brooklyn. “Heaven knows I have striven enough to make my mind its own place. I have resolution for the contest, and will not shrink or faint, but I know not, just at this moment, where to turn.”
And then, a chance conversation with her father landed her in print.

The two had read an essay by George Bancroft in the
North American Review
in which the young historian, hoping to stir up controversy, dissected the character of Brutus, a cherished idol to many in the fledgling American republic. Bancroft charged Brutus with being impulsive and lacking “coolness of judgement,” and he faulted Roman historians for making him a hero simply for assassinating Julius Caesar.
Timothy and Margaret were incensed—particularly Margaret, whose passion for the ancients was the great legacy of her early studies with her father. Although she had mixed feelings about her father’s teaching methods, “Roman virtue” was, for Margaret, an ideal never to be disputed. “ROME! it stands by itself, a clear Word. The power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose is what it utters,” she had come to believe through her childhood reading.
Brutus, “mild in his temper” and with “a greatness of mind, that was superior to anger, avarice and the love of pleasure,” was one of the chief exemplars of Roman virtue, she would soon argue in the pages of the
Boston Daily Advertiser,
refuting Bancroft’s charge.

As Margaret told Henry Hedge afterward, “My father requested me to write a little piece in answer” to Bancroft’s attack, which Timothy then sent to the
Advertiser,
a newspaper that circulated widely in Massachusetts.
Margaret’s essay ran unsigned under the title “Brutus” on November 27, 1834. Her argument was a more sophisticated version of the “Possunt quia posse videntur” theme she’d written for her father in adolescence; she defined the elements of a noble character, then illustrated their presence in Brutus. If her defense of the Roman politician as mild of temper and superior to anger seemed to tweak Timothy, it was also an oblique articulation of her domestic struggle: she was reluctant “to lose this object of reverence from among the heart’s household gods,” she confided at the start of the essay.

Why did Timothy turn over this writing task to Margaret? He’d moved the family to Groton intending to make a name for himself with a historical work. Perhaps a mere letter to the editor was beneath his dignity. Or was he stepping aside? Timothy may have sensed Margaret’s more powerful ambition, her will to succeed. If the publication of “Brutus” was the result of Timothy’s “request”—a final assignment—it was a gift, unlike the shaded arbor in Margaret’s Grove, that his oldest child and best pupil truly needed and was happy to accept. Timothy had acted as the “friend at once efficient and sympathizing” that Margaret claimed to lack.

Yet Margaret’s letter to Henry Hedge is her only account of the venture. Could she have contrived this explanation, or played up her father’s role, to disguise her ambitious foray as the design of a man, her father? However the publication came about, Margaret had an important taste of victory—she had reached an audience at last. Her “little piece” even provoked a rebuttal from a reader in Salem, who nonetheless praised her “ability” as a writer. He “seemed to
consider me
as an elderly gentleman,” Margaret wrote to Henry Hedge.
Never one to shy away from disputes, she took this as a compliment.

The step into print proved energizing. Margaret may have needed Timothy’s assignment and his connections to gain a foothold, but this would be the last time her father figured in her plans for publication. In the spring, James Clarke wrote announcing the start of a literary journal to be published in Cincinnati, for which he would serve as one of the editors, and asked Margaret’s help in filling the first issues. He welcomed essays on “topics of religion, morals, literature, art, or anything
you
feel to be worth writing about.”
In a second prodding letter he urged: “Don’t be afraid, there is no public opinion here. You are throwing your ideas to help form one.” She could even “be as transcendental” as she wished.

By August of 1835, Margaret had published two lengthy book reviews in successive issues of Clarke’s
Western Messenger
and proposed a third. The first appeared in the June debut issue, a review of memoirs by two English writers of the infamous Blue Stocking Club, George Crabbe and Hannah More, in which Margaret traced their paths into London’s “most brilliant circle,” a circle centered on women writers and intellectuals, and beyond.
For the August issue she reviewed Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel
The Last Days of Pompeii,
taking the opportunity to analyze the author’s complete body of work, observing a progression from the satirical toward “the ideal.”
Margaret’s first literary essays—both of which revealed her interest in the formation of important literary careers—appeared unsigned in a fledgling journal published for an audience its founder considered barely educated. But the
Western Messenger
was widely read in New England, where most of its writers were born and educated, though many had migrated west along with James Clarke. Margaret was the only female writer whose work appeared in these pages; James had not left her behind.