Margaret Fuller (26 page)

Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” were defiantly back: “A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God.”
And once again Alcott took the brunt of the criticism for the publication, which was otherwise gaining a modicum of acceptance as an “exponent of Literary Liberty.” One reviewer allowed that Alcott’s mystical dicta “need not frighten any body.”

Margaret invited Theodore Parker to augment her defense of Goethe with a general article on the “most original, fresh, and religious literature of all modern times,” that of the German Romantics; and Sam Ward wrote on Boccaccio and classic Italian literature.
Margaret herself reviewed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first volume of children’s stories,
Grandfather’s Chair,
published by Elizabeth Peabody, taking the opportunity to mete out more general praise: “No one of all our imaginative writers has indicated a genius at once so fine and rich.” She singled out his “power” of “making present the past scenes of our own history” and expressed the hope that Hawthorne would write again for “older and sadder” readers.

For those readers—
The Dial
’s readers—Margaret offered still more challenging fare: Sophia Ripley’s essay titled “Woman,” revised after its first presentation to Margaret’s Conversation class the previous year.
A searing indictment as closely reasoned as Alcott’s “Sayings” were cryptic, the essay charged that “in our present state of society woman possesses not; she is under possession,” referring to laws that barred married women from owning or inheriting property. From girlhood, “woman is educated with the tacit understanding, that she is only half a being, and an appendage.” Once married, she “spends life in conforming to” her husband’s wishes “instead of moulding herself to her own ideal. Thus she loses her individuality, and never gains his respect.” After becoming a mother, “she is only the upper nurse,” whereas the father is “the oracle. His wish is law, hers only the unavailing sigh uttered in secret.” Through it all, “she looks out into life, finds nothing there but confusion, and congratulates herself that it is man’s business, not hers.”

“Is this woman’s destiny?” Sophia Ripley demanded in exasperation, seemingly as ready to abandon the role of conventional wife as her husband, George, had been to shed his minister’s robes. Restricting the entire female sex to “a sphere is vain, for no two persons naturally have the same,” she argued. “Character, intellect creates the sphere of each,” not sex, “and this separation is ruinous to the highest improvement of both” men and women. She proposed instead that every woman be “encouraged to question . . . gradually forming her own ideal.” A woman “should still be herself” after marriage, and “her own individuality should be as precious to her” as her husband’s love. She closed provocatively: “Is this the ideal of a perfect woman, and if so, how does it differ from a perfect man?”

Margaret approached the same subject—a new feminine ideal—from a different perspective in a prose meditation she called “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain.” She improvised on a story she’d heard from a neighbor in Jamaica Plain, Dr. William Eustis, a lonely bachelor in his fifties and an avid amateur horticulturalist, who had stopped in to see Margaret’s mother shortly before Margarett Crane traveled south in October. Nearly dozing on the couch while Eustis droned on, Margaret nevertheless found herself intrigued by the man’s excessively detailed description—“not like a botanist, but a lover”—of his “interview” with a flowering magnolia tree on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, not far from where her mother would soon be living. The tale seemed almost “romantic,” and Margaret began to think of shaping it into a “true poem,” an allegory of an encounter between male and female.
What might a female become if allowed by an adoring male to bloom on her own? What might that man learn from her?

Margaret’s Magnolia has a history to relate when a nameless male traveler follows a strange fragrance and finds her “singing to herself in her lonely bower,” though she scarcely deigns to speak to him.
Her wisdom derives from “a being of another order from thee”—“Secret, radiant, profound . . . feminine,” the Magnolia explains, and may not be communicated “in any language now possible betwixt us.” Yet she recalls for him her former life when she was, instead, an orange tree, blooming in “endless profusion,” offering up her fruit to merchants for sale and her blossoms to brides as ornamental garlands, but suffering inwardly: “I had no mine or thine, I belonged to all, I could never rest, I was never at one.” As a bounteous orange tree, hers was the conventional woman’s fate, so well described by Sophia Ripley. It was also Margaret’s, as family caretaker, schoolteacher, Conversation instigator, and nursemaid to
The Dial
’s sometimes “laggard and lukewarm” contributors.

But chill weather and exhaustion bring the orange tree’s death—and subsequent rebirth under the influence of that higher feminine power, “the queen and guardian of the flowers.” “Take a step inward . . . become a vestal priestess and bide thy time in the Magnolia,” the frozen tree is told. “I was driven back upon the centre of my being, and there found all being,” the Magnolia concludes her tale. Contrary to Margaret’s long-ago Thanksgiving Day epiphany, that burst of self-renunciation while still under her father’s command, here it was possible to find both self and “All.” In Margaret’s story, the nameless man rides on after the flower bids him “farewell, to meet again in prayer, in destiny, in harmony, in elemental power.” The Magnolia instructs him: “All the secret powers are ‘Mothers’ . . . Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existence.”

Here was a radical shift from Margaret’s “Essay on Critics,” in which creative artists are all men. Perhaps the new living situation she had established for herself, independent and “almost happy,” had helped her achieve the Magnolia’s self-sustaining wisdom. “I cannot plunge into myself enough,” she had written to Cary Sturgis in late October as her family scattered and she took possession of Willow Brook. She described then a sense of personal “transformation,” borrowing her metaphor from nature: “The leaf became a stem, a bud, is now in flower.”
The nameless rider learns a similar lesson from the Magnolia: that he must “prize the monitions of my nature” and that “sometimes what is not for sale in the market-place” is of the highest value.

But in Boston in 1841, on the banks of the busy Charles River rather than the serene, idealized Lake Pontchartrain, could men learn from women? Margaret would soon find out. Her Conversations had attracted the interest of the men in her circle, and she’d invited several of them to join the women for a ten-week series meeting on Monday nights, to begin the first week of March. The class filled immediately, netting her six hundred dollars in ticket fees.

Waldo, to whom she had not at first revealed her authorship of “The Magnolia”—she’d published it without an identifying initial—would be among those attending. He’d admired the third issue: “the good Public ought to be humbly thankful,” he’d written to her. As long as Margaret could “hold [her] volatile regiment together,” the future of
The Dial
was secure, he believed. But he prodded her: “I . . . cannot settle the authorship of the Magnolia.”

When Margaret admitted the piece was hers, Waldo was unsurprised, admiring its “fervid Southern eloquence” and predicting its “permanent value.” Her fable caused him to wonder, however, as he had so often before, “how you fell into the Massachusetts.” The tale was “rich and sad,” yet “it should not be—if one could only show why not!”
Waldo had had more than one opportunity to “show why not”: to ease Margaret’s sadness. His apparently heartless vacillations would ultimately force her departure from “the Massachusetts” and the “large and brilliant circle” she had helped him gather there. Margaret could play both characters in her allegory, female and male. She would flower, and then ride on.

12

Communities and Covenants

W
ALDO EMERSON WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO RECEIVE AN
invitation to Margaret’s evening Conversation series, and she should have taken his response as a sign of trouble to come. He would be glad, he told her, “to hear you talk
from the tripod
” on classical myth “or any other topic”—Waldo was playing on the now widespread notion of Margaret as sibyl. But he did not “anticipate any reciprocal illumination of my own.” He would come to “the Mythology class” to listen to Margaret, but he could not promise to converse and did not expect enlightenment.
That was in December. By late February, with the first meeting less than a week away, he feigned ignorance of the plan. He would bring Lidian along for what “I thought . . . was a party,” he wrote to Cary Sturgis, who had also enrolled. “That it is a class is new.”
Then he missed the opening session, claiming to have received notice of the gathering a day too late.

In the end, Lidian may not have joined her husband at George and Sophia Ripley’s house in Bedford Place, where the Conversations were held during the early spring months of 1841, before the Ripleys decamped to Brook Farm in West Roxbury. The renegade minister and his dissident wife had acquired a 170-acre property eight miles from Boston and attracted a small band of like-minded investors to join them in forming a “Community” to promote “a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.” There, labor and profits would be shared equally; art and reform would thrive along with corn and potatoes.
Nathaniel Hawthorne had been among the first to sign on, purchasing two shares at five hundred dollars each in hopes of making a home at Brook Farm for himself and his fiancée, Sophia Peabody.

But equality was not the watchword at Margaret’s Monday-night class. If Lidian Emerson was there, she never spoke. Margaret was hard-pressed to bring together the two contingents she had cultivated for more than a decade. Her friendships with men could be sincere and confiding, particularly in correspondence, but in social settings she easily adapted to their banter and disputation, frequently besting them at it. With the women of her Conversations, however, she had deliberately fostered a “simple earnestness,” a spirit of collaborative inquiry.
As one woman later recalled of the group experience, “I was no longer the limitation of myself.” Margaret led the women collectively into “a new world of thought”; she “opened the book of life and helped us to read it for ourselves.”
Her male friends were not so willing to follow.

It had been one thing for Margaret and a few other women to be invited occasionally as guests to meetings of “the club of clubs,” as Waldo once wrote magnanimously to Margaret, urging her to attend an otherwise all-male Transcendental Club meeting in order to “inspire our reptile wits,” but quite another for a man to join an ongoing conversation among women based in “simple earnestness,” especially with other men looking on.
Waldo, in whom Margaret had confided her certainty that the women’s minds, “when once awakened,” could not “cease to vibrate,” must have wondered what place, if any, there was for him in such a gathering. There had been “more Greek than Bostonian spoken at the meetings,” Margaret assured him of her first series, “& we may have pure honey of Hymettus”—the Athenian mountain noted for its thyme-covered foothills—“to give you yet.”
But was this a “Greek” that men could speak and understand? Or was it the Magnolia’s “secret, radiant, profound . . . feminine” language: “of another order” and incommunicable to men?

Like the stranger in Margaret’s fable, Waldo would never find out. From the start, as might have been expected, the men more often took the floor—and held it. Among these were Henry Hedge, Bronson Alcott, and James Freeman Clarke, who had returned to Boston despite being refused George Ripley’s recently vacated pulpit to found his own Church of the Disciples. And, on those Monday nights when he could manage the trip from Concord, Waldo Emerson appeared and quickly forgot his promise to offer no “reciprocal illumination.”

On March 1, the opening session that Waldo missed, Margaret commenced by advising all in attendance to “denationalize” themselves, to forget their American prejudices and “throw the mind back” to the Greek golden age.
The Greeks, she explained, had likely “borrowed” their deities from the Egyptians and the Hindus—who “dwelt in the All, the infinite”—and then “analyzed” and “to some degree humanized” them as personifications of distinct qualities. She conjured up Rhea, the mother of all gods and goddesses, representing “Productive Energy,” like the Egyptian fertility goddess Isis. Then she offered brief sketches of Rhea’s progeny: Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Diana, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, all “embodiments of Absolute Ideas”—Will, Wisdom, Thought, Purity, Genius, Beauty.

Frank Shaw broke in to ask how these personifications had “suggested themselves in that barbarous age.” Unfazed, Margaret responded as she had the year before to Mary Jane Quincy, countering that “the word
barbarous
” simply did not apply to “the age of Plato,” a time when “the human intellect reached a point as elevated in some respects as any it had ever touched.”

But Frank Shaw was not so easily convinced. Just retired at age thirty from one of the great Boston mercantile firms, repulsed by the greed and exploitation he’d witnessed in the family business and at slave-trading ports in the West Indies and the American South, Frank Shaw was a prime backer of the Ripleys’ communal experiment at Brook Farm. His objection now was altogether different from Mrs. Quincy’s. He argued that the Hindus must have had the superior belief system: wasn’t the “infinity” of the Hindus “impaired” when the Greeks assigned to their gods “the duties, passions, and criminal indulgences of men”? By “bringing their deities to the human level,” Frank thought, “the Greeks had taken one step down.”

William White, a young reform-minded journalist, took another tack: What of the “North American Indian’s worship of the Manitou,” a god with “no passion that had degraded humanity”? Wasn’t that “purer than the Greek worship”? Soon Henry Hedge was chiming in with an erudite gloss. “Nobody could show a purely Greek mythos,” he pointed out, whereupon William White insisted that “culture,” no matter how advanced, could not bring about spiritual enlightenment. Christian “revelation” was needed to “complete the work.” The men had brought the conversation back around to church matters.