Margaret Fuller (6 page)

Before coming to Dr. Park’s school, she had seized on another novel from her father’s bookshelves, an English translation of the German author Christoph Wieland’s
Oberon.
At nine she wrote to Timothy that she had “never read anything that delighted me so much as that book.” Cleverly, she had not asked his permission to read it the first time, but she begged his approval for a second reading, once “I get the card that has
Best
upon it” at the Port School; there was no point in denying her.
A medieval fantasy of Charlemagne’s court, with the fairy king and queen hovering in the background,
Oberon
is the tale of two fervid lovers, the pagan Princess Rezia and her devoted knight Huon, who struggle to obey Oberon’s order that they remain chaste while they travel by ship to Rome to ask permission for a Christian wedding. Even if the nine-year-old did not precisely understand the rapturous island scene in which Huon “defies the god,” Rezia “yields,” and “their secret union” is achieved, she could have perceived the couple’s transgression when they gave in to love’s “sweet control,” along with the passionate feelings that left them, afterward, “embath’d in bliss.”
And she would have felt the tragedy when Oberon sends a storm their way as punishment, ordering Huon to give up his life to save his lover and the ship. Instead, both lovers leap overboard to drown together.

The girl who thrilled to this tale, in which pagan sensuality and Christian law collide to tragic effect, could not pretend to “have religion” in the conventional sense. She could not settle down to the business of becoming one of “the dashing misses of the city,” dancing with schoolboys and giving herself over to “fashion and frivolity” with her new classmates.
As Susan Channing’s younger brother William Henry, Margaret’s age mate, later recalled, “a sad feeling prevailed” that Margaret “was paying the penalty . . . in nearsightedness, awkward manners, extravagant tendencies of thought, and a pedantic style of talk” for having been “overtasked by her father, who wished to train her like a boy.” Little wonder that Margaret was “exposed to petty persecutions” and became “a butt for the ridicule” of the more “frivolous” girls at Dr. Park’s Lyceum.
She was a girl who found inspiration in male heroism, male transgression, hubris. She responded to the taunting “with indiscriminate sarcasms,” the weapon she had taken from her father’s arsenal along with his erudition, and “made herself formidable by her wit, and, of course, unpopular.”
Perhaps even Dr. Park, for whom she had quickly become a prized pupil, would not have understood her, had she revealed to him her hidden “true life.” German literature, which he considered polluted with “rhapsodical intimations,” was not taught in his school.

Although Margaret never spoke of the unpleasantness at Dr. Park’s Lyceum to her parents, Timothy withdrew her after eighteen months, sending her back to the Port School where she could supervise her two younger brothers in Latin. She was thirteen years old, and he kept her under his rule again while he searched for a boarding school to provide the “finish” for his oldest daughter’s education. No American college had yet opened its doors to women, and few parents, not even Timothy, thought it an opportunity lost. Although he was ambitious for his daughter, his plans for her future could have been no more definite than her own, and certainly featured a brilliant marriage as its centerpiece. As she entered her teens, Margaret became, to her parents, “this hopeful of ours.”
Timothy began to fret more over his oldest child’s “manners and disposition” than her facility with Latin declensions and to insist she attend to “her musick & her sewing as well as to her Greek.”

Dr. Park was sorry to let his prize pupil go. He drew Margaret aside to deliver a parting “address,” saying “that he never
flattered,
”
yet stating outright, Margarett Crane reported to Timothy, that “he had never had a pupil with half her attainments at her age.”
Her classmates were less sorry. Hoping, at the last, to gain in their affection, Margaret planned a farewell dancing party at Cherry Street. Timothy was in Washington, but her Fuller uncles Elisha and Henry hired the musicians, and her mother paid out another fifty dollars for refreshments—after gaining Timothy’s permission and extracting the sum from tight-fisted Uncle Abraham. Margaret told her father it would be a party for forty friends, but she sent out ninety invitations to girls in Boston and her old Port School friends. Two days before the dance, only nine had responded.

Margaret was chagrined, not hurt. Or she pretended not to be. When, deterred by the snowy evening or their young hostess’s “formidable” wit, scarcely more than the nine appeared for the dance, Margaret made matters worse by fawning over the few Boston girls and ignoring her old Cambridge friends. She never gave her father the full account of the proceedings he pressed for. The dance had been “exceedingly agreeable,” she lied.
The event was “
well over,
” her mother summarized.
If, as a result of the fiasco, Margaret was forced to realize she had become “notoriously unpopular with the ladies of her circle,” as Henry Hedge, the equally precocious son of the Harvard professor Levi Hedge, put it, she maintained a proud silence.
Margaret had her “true” life to rely on, as she always had. In a letter she had written at age nine but never sent to Ellen Kilshaw, Margaret had spun out a fantasy of her family’s “nobility of blood,” with her brother William Henry as king, Eugene the “prince of Savoy,” and Margaret herself both “queen [and] the duchess of Marlborough.”
It was a notion that would sustain her in later years as well, that “my natural position . . . is regal.—Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen!”
She would not let “circumstance”—her residence in dreary Cambridgeport, her difficulties with girls her own age, her alternately bullying and neglectful parents—erode her “enthusiastic confidence in the future.”

4

Mariana

A
DISFIGURING RED “FLUSH” ROSE TO HER CHEEKS AND
forehead, and would not go away.
Timothy believed the “eruption”
on Margaret’s face was caused by her high spirits, the force of will she had extolled in her essay and that he had once approved in her; Margaret sensed he was “mortified to see the fineness of my complexion destroyed.”
Timothy harped on her need for “instruction” in “feminine discipline . . . female
propriety,
& disposition.”
She began to think of herself as “an odd and unpleasing girl.”
It didn’t help to have a flawlessly beautiful and accommodating mother, “much taller than I,”
and an apple-cheeked baby sister who seemingly could do no wrong. Ellen’s arrival in the family aroused Timothy’s sense of correctness: his sons could be energetic,
boyish,
but his daughters must display “the virtues & graces.” And a third son, Arthur, was born two years after Ellen, in 1822, while Margaret was accumulating medals at Dr. Park’s school. Margaret was already “too independent,”
a poor example for three-year-old Ellen. But it was too late to change the habits of mind that Timothy himself had fostered in his oldest child. When no remedy cured the skin condition (probably acne), Margaret put aside her own “wounded” vanity and “made up my mind to be bright and ugly.”

It was a vow more easily stated than adhered to, especially when she once again found herself surrounded by girls each day, and all night as well. Margaret had begged to attend the new girls’ academy in Boston opened by the former principal at Boston’s English Classical School, George B. Emerson; there she’d be able to learn Greek, a language she had not yet studied systematically. But her pleas to expand her classical education no longer affected Timothy. He objected, instead, to the daily commute into Boston, whether she rode or walked—“for I should grieve to have your complexion ruined past remedy by exposure to the heat & violent exercise.”

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.