Margaret Fuller (35 page)

In one short season, the town of Concord had become a “world of infants.”
Ellen and Ellery Channing’s first child, a girl named Margaret and nicknamed “Greta,” was born the same day that Margaret finished writing
Summer on the Lakes
—her birthday. Earlier that spring, Sophia Hawthorne had carried her first child to term after a disheartening miscarriage the year before. The Hawthornes’ little girl was named Una, after one of Edmund Spenser’s chaste heroines, the representative of pure faith in his allegorical verse epic
The Faerie Queene.
In June of 1844, Sophia generously took a second baby to breast, nourishing the hungry Greta when Ellen’s milk failed. In July, Lidian Emerson gave birth to a second son, Edward, the day before Margaret arrived for her summer visit; Margaret stayed first with the Hawthornes, taking turns with Sophia at minding little Una, and then stole a solitary week in the Channings’ empty house. In an early sign that the couple’s marital strains would not diminish, Ellen had taken Greta to stay with Margarett Crane in Cambridge while Ellery set out with Henry Thoreau to the Catskills for vagabonding.

Although Margaret had written to Waldo the previous winter that she hoped his next child would be a son, to help ease the loss of his firstborn—“men do not feel themselves represented to the next generation by
daughters,
” she had learned from her own father—she decided that on the whole it was fortunate that her sister’s baby was a girl.
“Girls are to have a better chance now I think,” she prophesied.
But that better chance still lay in the future. Margaret was as uncertain as ever of the merits of being an adult female in her own time and place, which still meant leading a primarily private life. While she never wished herself a man—“I love best to be a woman”—Margaret felt that “womanhood is at present too straitly-bounded to give me scope.”
She resented the need to choose to be “either private or public,” a choice men did not face, even with the advent of parenthood.

When she considered the lives of her sister, Ellen, of Sophia Hawthorne and Lidian Emerson, Margaret felt at times that she might manage to “live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle.”
The bare truth was that “I have no child,” she wrote in her journal, though “the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyze me.” That same paralyzing “want” was also, she understood, “a great privilege . . . [to] have no way tied my hands or feet.”
These young and not-so-young mothers, she could see, “feel withdrawn by sweet duties from Reality.”
Yet while a public life might provide wider “scope,” the prospect was daunting, inducing “palsy” when Margaret imagined herself “play[ing] the artist,” like her idols Madame de Staël and George Sand.
These were European women of means; how could she manage such a life in New England?

In February 1844, before the publication of
Summer on the Lakes,
before the births of Una, Greta, and Edward, Margaret had considered renting a house in Concord across the street from Waldo’s. The rent was just sixty dollars a year, and Richard could join Margaret and her mother there, once he graduated from Harvard in August.
The Conversations, which had provided Margaret’s chief support while living in or near Boston, were dwindling in popularity; perhaps the time had come to withdraw to an inexpensive house in the country and attempt to “play the artist,” to write more books. In March she also faced the certainty that William Clarke, for whom she’d entertained an infatuation the summer before, simply had no interest in forming a lasting connection, either as “companion” or “to be loved.”
William had arrived in Boston to visit his family and avoided Margaret at every turn. Worse, like other men before him, he was smitten with Cary Sturgis, who did not return the westerner’s interest. Margaret hated the reminder of her relative plainness—that “I am such a shabby plant, of such coarse tissue.” With spring in the air, it was painful “not to be beautiful, when all around is so.”
Margaret was momentarily undone by these “keen pangs” of “disappointment” and resolved to “wean myself” from “close habits of personal relations.”

The Conversations had allowed Margaret to tread a fine line between public and private life, offering her the means to develop and express provocative ideas within the relative safety of a domestic parlor—or Elizabeth Peabody’s communal bookroom—just as the near anonymity of her articles in the “poor little”
Dial,
in Waldo’s phrase, had dulled the impact of her incisive critiques and allegorical fiction. Conversation topics in recent years had strayed ever farther from Greek myth, allowing Margaret to make “wide digressions” into “autobiographic illustration” on “Culture, Ignorance, Vanity, Prudence, Patience,” and “Health.”
But in 1843–44, only sixteen women purchased tickets—“there is no persuading people to be interested in one always or long even,” she sighed to Waldo.
Margaret decided this series would be the last. It had been six years “of such relations . . . with so many, & so various minds!” At one time, the classes had swelled to include Julia Ward, a New York City socialite engaged to marry the Boston reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived with her lawyer husband in Boston before moving to Seneca Falls. Now the closing session in late April brought tears from the sixteen stalwarts, as well as bouquets of purple heliotrope and passionflowers. “Life
is
worth living—is it not?” Margaret asked, and collapsed on Cary Sturgis’s couch afterward for a rest.

The final issue of
The Dial
appeared the same month. Margaret’s single contribution was a fictional dialogue between two old friends over their weakening bond. “Our intercourse no longer ministers to my thoughts, to my hopes,” declares one. “Ah! you have become indifferent to me,” cries the other, only to be admonished that “reason seems cold because it is calm.”
Margaret’s dialogue was framed by two of Sam Ward’s poems, “The Twin Loves” and “The Consolers.” The issue was thick with poetry—by Thoreau, Ellery Channing, and Waldo, including his own verse commentary on a fading friendship, “The Visit.”

Margaret had been right.
The Dial
under Waldo Emerson was more than ever a matter of friends writing for one another—and, in this farewell issue at least, quite often
about
friendship. The circle had contracted, become suffocating, stifling, small. Now that both of her professional outlets in Boston were gone, Margaret saw that these intellectual proving grounds had finally come to limit her range of influence. She had reason to “doubt whether this climate will ripen my fruit.”

In early June, Cary came to stay with her in Cambridge while Margaret’s mother spent two weeks in Concord helping Ellen with the new baby. Margaret would always find reasons to envy Cary, through whom “the stream of love flows full & free enough to upbear your life.” Waldo’s love for Cary, Margaret knew, though unspoken and never to be acted upon, was balm. For Cary, “The keel does not grate against the rocky bottom,” the painful depths of rejection Margaret had experienced.
Yet if Cary could not have Waldo as a partner in “Reality,” how different was Cary’s situation from Margaret’s own intensifying belief that “I am not fitted to be loved”? Margaret now prepared herself to be “as much alone as possible,” to accept that a solitary life “is best for me.”
The two friends managed a happy coexistence this summer, an “independent life in the still house.”
It was a way of life she might try again, but never again in Cambridge, she decided. With Richard graduating in August, Margaret longed to “get beyond reach” of the college bell’s “clang.”
When the lease on the Ellery Street house expired in September, she would give it up.

Idling in the nursery at Concord was not the answer either. Talking with Waldo again in July, taking the measure of his “transcendental fatalism,” helped her see this.
She understood fully now that her “disappointments” in Waldo, as she wrote to him in a letter that must have felt like a parting handshake, were the result of “a youthful ignorance in me which asked of you what was not in your nature to give.”
Her last
Dial
contribution had said much the same. “Life here slumbers and steals on like the river,” she added, thinking of the lazy afternoons she’d spent basking in the sun on a favorite boulder beside the Concord River at the Old Manse. “A very good place for a sage, but not for the lyrist or orator.”
If Margaret would sing or speak, and be heard, it must be from elsewhere. Perhaps, her words hinted, Waldo himself would do well to shift his own base of operations. Margaret would not rent the house across the road.

She knew that “deep yearnings of the heart” such as those she had experienced in years past at Concord would be “felt again, & then I shall long for some dear hand to hold.” But she embraced “the blessings of my comparative freedom. I stand in no false relations.” Concord was not just a nursery, but a village made up of those “who only
seem
husbands wives, & friends.” Margaret’s own “curse”—to be “much alone”—was “nothing compared with that of those who have entered into those relations, but not made them real.”

A young friend she’d met the year before at Brook Farm, Georgiana Bruce, urged Margaret to write an expansive novel on womanhood—a bildungsroman like Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.
Georgiana’s own “adventurous course”
in life had come to fascinate Margaret. Tired of the intrigues of sylvan fellowship at the West Roxbury community, Georgiana had taken a job as assistant to the reform-minded Quaker Eliza Farnham, newly installed as matron of the women’s prison at Sing Sing on the Hudson River, thirty miles upstream from New York City. Margaret told Georgiana she would not write the
Apprenticeship;
she doubted her capabilities as a writer of fiction. But she had accepted a suggestion from Horace Greeley that she expand “The Great Lawsuit” into a book—or “pamphlet,” as she persisted in referring to the volume through most of her work on the project—which Greeley, who admired the essay’s “remarkable justness” and “brilliancy,” promised to shepherd into print.
When Georgiana Bruce sent Margaret some of the journals that the female inmates at Sing Sing had written under Eliza Farnham’s program of rehabilitation, Margaret felt certain these women’s stories had a place in her new book.

William Channing, a founding member of the New York Prison Association and an occasional visiting preacher to the men at Sing Sing, encouraged Margaret’s new interest in female “moral reform”—most of the women prisoners were prostitutes. But Margaret insisted their “degradation” had less to do with personal moral failings than with the plight of women in general. The prisoners’ diaries, she believed, “express[ed] most powerfully the present wants of the sex at large.” As for the incarcerated women, “What blasphemes in them must fret and murmur in the perfumed boudoir.” There was no separating one woman’s disgrace—or deliverance—from another’s, “for a society beats with one great heart.”
Margaret decided to take lodgings for the fall in the small town of Fishkill Landing, thirty miles upriver from Sing Sing, to make her own mercy call at the prison—she wished to meet these women as she had the Chippewa and Ottawa Indians at Mackinac—and to complete her “pamphlet.” She would bring along Cary Sturgis, with whom she knew she could live “so pleasantly together and apart.” Cary was writing and illustrating her own book, a collection of children’s tales.

After this departure, Margaret would scarcely ever return to New England. She had decided to accept another of Horace Greeley’s offers, this one to become literary editor of the
New-York Tribune.
Greeley had closed his literary magazine,
The New-Yorker,
to found the
Tribune
shortly after
The Dial
came into existence, and his daily paper had achieved a success well beyond that of the Transcendentalists’ high-minded quarterly he so admired, with more than thirty thousand subscribers in the city and many more readers of its weekly edition throughout the northern states and the western territories where Margaret had traveled.
For Margaret, accepting the assignment meant moving to the city in order to write regular columns—not just book reviews—on all the arts. Greeley considered Margaret “already eminent in the higher walks of Literature” and believed her contributions would “render this paper inferior to no other in the extent and character of its Literary matter,” as he wrote when he announced she would take over the editorship in December 1844.
Not only would Margaret’s reviews and reportage bring distinction to the
Tribune,
but the attention she gave to the city’s burgeoning performing arts would help make New York America’s first city, as it was fast becoming, leaving Boston, with its inward-looking philosophers and single-minded reformers, far behind. Margaret always retained her New England–bred, spiritually based intellectualism, her belief that “the wiser mind rejoices that it can no way be excused from constant thought, from an ever springing life.”
But it was time to “at least try”
to make her way in “the busy rushing world” of New York City.

For seven weeks in October and November of 1844, Margaret wrote and revised at Fishkill Landing, the manuscript “spinning out beneath my hand.”
Once again she produced an amalgam, introducing into her original critique of “personal relations” (inspired to a large extent by Conversations at West Street and conversations with Waldo) her new ideas on the women of Sing Sing, an extended catalogue of influential women in the past and present, further thoughts on woman’s essential nature and the possibilities and impossibilities of marriage, and a culminating argument that women should take up the anti-slavery cause. “When it comes to casting my thought into form,” Margaret reflected now, “no old one suits me.” She preferred instead to “invent one,” which allowed “the pleasure of creation” to spur her on.
When she had completed her “pamphlet”—
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
would be its title at publication in February 1845—she felt “a delightful glow as if I had put a good deal of my true life in it.” So closely identified was she with the work that, she wrote to William Channing, she expected to continue to revise it with future editions—“to be able to make it constantly better,” the same wish Margaret had always had for herself.