Margaret Fuller (9 page)

Eliza, who was new to Cambridge and still reconciling herself to a permanent American residence, saw Margaret’s “extraordinary promise” as clearly as Ellen Kilshaw had, and made a project of her young neighbor. Her plan was to “mould her externally,” as a mutual acquaintance observed, “to make her less abrupt, less self-asserting, more
comme il faut
in ideas, manners, and even costume.”
If Margarett Crane was stung by her daughter’s defection to another household, Timothy could not have minded the results. Eliza gave new orders to Margaret’s dressmaker and hairdresser and took Margaret on social calls to refine her manners. Shedding pounds along with her adolescence, Margaret would never again be faulted for ill-fitting clothes or frowsy hair. Her slouching posture, the result of kyphosis, an S-like curvature of the spine, now began to seem swanlike, not slumping. By the end of this education, Margaret looked back on her younger self as “the most intolerable girl that ever took a seat in a drawing room.”
Crucially, however, she was not being schooled in deference; Eliza Farrar’s ideal woman was no demure drawing room fixture, as Margarett Crane so easily became in social settings. Margaret was learning to play the lady bountiful, to become a “gentlewoman,” as Eliza recommended in
The Young Lady’s Friend,
who could actively demonstrate her ability to “behave courteously and delicately to all.”
From Eliza Farrar she was discovering, above all, that a strong-willed woman could give lessons to other women on what to think and how to behave.

Although its publication was some years in the future, Eliza Farrar’s
Young Lady’s Friend,
which adroitly linked Yankee frugality and high-mindedness with Old World cultivation and noblesse oblige, speaks with the force of moral authority that Eliza must have exerted over Margaret. Eliza’s code of etiquette was based on a notion of class privilege within a democracy, and she gave her female readers instruction on upward mobility through displays of refinement—the means through which she had won her marriage to a distinguished Harvard professor. Her message must have registered with Margaret, who as a child had fancied herself a queen even as she thrilled to tales of the Roman Republic. “In no country is it more important to cultivate good manners, than in our own,” Eliza Farrar wrote, “where we acknowledge no distinctions but what are founded on character and manners.” America’s aristocracy of merit, still taking shape in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was open to all but the “person who is bold, coarse, vociferous, and inattentive to the rights and feelings of others,” for she “is a vulgar woman, let her possessions be ever so great, and her way of living ever so genteel. Thus we may see a lady sewing for her livelihood, and a vulgar woman presiding over a most expensive establishment.”

Eliza Farrar admonished her readers to master and perform daily household chores—making their beds, tidying their rooms, even if they had servants on hand to discharge these tasks—as a means of showing respect to their social inferiors and earning their good favor. In fashion, Farrar declared, the way a woman carried her shawl—whether “dragged round the shoulders” or “worn in graceful folds”—mattered more than the quality of the fabric, because “true taste will generally be found on the side of economy.” A “love of finery” was to be discouraged; mothers were advised to give their daughters plainly dressed dolls so as to ward off an infatuation with “tawdry ornament.”
To American women struggling to make ends meet in the financially turbulent decade of the 1830s, when many fortunes made in the early years of the republic were lost in what came to be known as the Panic of 1837, this was welcome news.

She filled a chapter with recommendations on proper behavior at lectures, one of the few popular entertainments of the day that women could attend unescorted. Lectures provided opportunities for women to gather material for conversation and to practice their manners in mixed society. Those “who attend lectures together,” Eliza wrote, “meet on terms of perfect equality.”
The lecture hall was a place where a ladylike seamstress might well attract a gentleman’s notice, so it was best to remember that a “gentlewoman” would not arrive late, or wear a large hat that might obstruct the view of those behind her, or “run, jump, scream, scramble, and push, in order to get a good seat.”
Neither would a gentlewoman stand at the podium to address the crowd; so well understood was this prohibition that there had been no need to state it.

Eliza Farrar’s program culminated in her chapter on conversation, “one of the highest attainments of civilized society,” yet rarely cultivated in the United States, she lamented. Americans excelled in verbal “fluency,” she conceded, but few had trained themselves to become “correct and methodical thinkers,” and many were given to “careless and thoughtless volubility.” She counseled young ladies to avoid superlatives, slang, and repetition; to listen as well as to speak; and never to gossip or tease. For those who became adept in the conversational “art,” social discourse was the “way in which gifted minds exert their influence.”

At eighteen, Margaret had already made herself a prime example of a gifted mind exerting influence through conversation. A natural speaker, trained in “correct and methodical” thinking by her father, she had also learned to restrain her tendency to tease and quiz, making herself less “intolerable” in the drawing room. She could now hold in reserve her barbed wit, a faculty she had too often resorted to as an offensive tactic when sparring verbally with young America’s sometimes less-than-well-mannered gentlemen and as a defensive one when she felt hurt.

Margaret needed her “elected” mother’s guidance far more in matters of dress and comportment than in conversation; where she already sensed her own expertise, she would not take all of Eliza Farrar’s advice to heart. But Margaret accepted wholeheartedly another of Eliza Farrar’s gifts—the friendship of Eliza’s cousin Anna Barker, a New York society girl with family ties to the freethinking Quaker merchants of New Bedford. Three years younger than Margaret, Anna often stopped in Cambridge on her way to Newport, Rhode Island, for summer holidays. Attracted as Margaret was to older women as mentors, she was still, as Eliza phrased it in her book, at “the precious morning of life.” And so was Anna, a lithe, dark-haired beauty as naturally alluring as Margaret was forceful. Both were entering that “season full of danger and temptation,” Eliza warned, when school is over and young ladies must guard against the feeling that their education is finished.

6

Elective Affinities

M
ARGARET FOLLOWED POLITICS—READ THE PAPERS FAITHFULLY
or listened to her father read the news aloud after dinner. In this way she learned, in early 1826, that the Russian throne had passed to Nicholas rather than to the “brutal” Constantine, his brother. “We may now hope more strongly for the liberties of unchained Europe,” Margaret rejoiced in a letter to Susan Prescott. She had come to care passionately for the cause of Greek independence after Lord Byron joined the fight and died there in 1824.
(The poet-revolutionary would become an obsession; two years later Margaret wrote to a friend, “My whole being is Byronized . . . my whole mind is possessed with one desire—to comprehend Byron once for all.”
) Now she waited in “anxious suspense” for the results of negotiations between Russia and England that would determine the country’s fate.

But when her father urged her to pay attention to his friend Albert Tracy, an unmarried congressman from upstate New York whom Timothy invited for a long visit during Margaret’s first summer back from school at Groton, she wasn’t interested. Later she would recall that despite Tracy’s obvious charms—his “powerful eye” and “imposing maniere d’être”
—she had not been “inclined to idealize lawyers and members of Congress” or, most especially, “
father’s friends.
”
Instead she was smitten by her distant cousin George Davis, who had moved to Cambridge from his home on Cape Cod to join Harvard’s class of 1829. Ironically, he would go on to become a lawyer and politician—a liberal Whig congressman and editor—but now, as he joined the Fuller household for evening meals and after-dinner talk and frequented the Farrars’ open house, he seemed simply the only one of a bright crowd of Harvard men who could match wits with Margaret and keep pace with her dynamic thoughts, a man with whom she could be “truly myself.”

Others in their set included her once sharply critical Cambridgeport schoolmate Oliver Wendell Holmes; the sometimes pedantic Henry Hedge, whose years of study in Germany before entering Harvard earned him the nickname “Germanicus” from the envious Margaret; the mathematician Benjamin Peirce; and the future Unitarian ministers James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing, and William Greenleaf Eliot, who later founded Washington University in St. Louis. Eliot complained, as many of the others might have, that Margaret treated him “like a plaything.”
Years later she wrote of a fictional “friend”: “Her mind was often the leading one, always effective.”
This was Margaret, even among the stars of Harvard’s brilliant class of ’29, the class that might have been hers, had she been a man. George Davis—bright-eyed, with regular features and a soft complexion—was her nearest equal in a roomful of fervent talkers. Like Margaret, he was capable of “intellectual abandon,” had the “habit of
letting himself go
in conversation,” drawing on his vast store of literary references—and he shared her inclination to analyze their friends, sometimes mercilessly.
George Davis and Margaret liked to “pull people to pieces to see what they were made of, and then divert themselves with the fragments,” one less-than-willing participant in their “college frolics” recalled.

But the attraction, on Margaret’s side at least, was more than a matter of verbal jousting and elevated gossip. While George Davis may have inspired the “gladiatorial disposition” she reported to Susan Prescott, Margaret was also losing interest in “light conversation.”
She was drawn to George Davis’s “contempt for shows and pretenses.”
For a time she believed he would answer that “aching wish for some person with whom I might talk fully and openly.”
Long after their initial intimacy, Margaret would remember that the two of them could “communicate more closely with one another than either could with the herd.”
The connection was “so open” and the “intimacy,” through several seasons of Cambridge evenings, “so long, so constant,”
that she felt their mingling of souls to be “conjugal.”

Then why didn’t he return her love? They exchanged letters, both flirtatious and sincere. Margaret told George Davis he had the “brilliant vivacity and airy self-possession” of the rogue Robert Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s novel of seduction,
Clarissa:
she admired his “character . . . based on the love of power and the spirit of enterprize.”
George Davis wrote asking for a statement of Margaret’s religious beliefs, a common query from a young man considering a marriage proposal. Margaret could easily have taken his question as a preamble to courtship—a step beyond the sort of intellectual challenge she encouraged in her male companions. Best of all, he may have wished to pay suit
and
to contend.

Margaret answered frankly, almost imperiously, with a bold admission of religious doubt, accompanied by a highhanded dismissal of anyone who didn’t share her skepticism: “I have determined not to form settled opinions at present. Loving or feeble natures need a positive religion, a visible refuge, a protection . . . But mine is not such.” As a child, Margaret had thrilled to tales of Greek and Roman conquests; the
Aeneid
was her text, not the Bible. Church was a place to let her mind wander on Sunday mornings, to find Ellen Kilshaw, that avatar of aesthetic culture and feminine refinement, far more inspiring than any sermon. If she had faith at all it was in “Eternal Progression” and in “a God” (not
the
God, or even
God
) that was synonymous with “Beauty and Perfection,” she wrote to George Davis.

In words she might later come to regret but would never renounce, Margaret went further: “When disappointed, I do not ask or wish consolation,—I wish to know and feel my pain, to investigate its nature and its source.” She acknowledged herself “singularly barren of illusions” for a nineteen-year-old and unwilling to have “my feelings soothed” by religious dogma. But Margaret did harbor the illusion that George Davis would receive her confidences sympathetically. Whether she saw his question as a romantic overture or as a comradely inquiry into her first principles, Margaret had revealed more to him of her private beliefs than she had ever admitted to anyone, and she counted on him to “read understandingly!”

Could he? Was George Davis the man Margaret willed him to be: a powerful, scintillating Lovelace who wouldn’t mind—might even treasure—a woman as powerful and scintillating as himself, a woman whose “pride,” as she confessed to him, “is superior to any feelings I have yet experienced”?
Margaret readily answered a second letter from George Davis on the topic of religion. He had declared himself “satisfied” with her initial response, yet something in this dry remark prompted her to clarify her position: no, she had not yet experienced “Christian Revelation,” the conversion experience widely recognized as a badge of Christian piety, and “do not feel it suited to me at present.”
Reading this blunt reply, George Davis—dazzling conversationalist, yet no daring Lovelace after all—must have wondered what sort of woman he had nearly fallen for. Perhaps he was one of those “feeble natures” who required a positive religion—along with most Americans of the time.

George Davis finished his college courses and left Cambridge for western Massachusetts to prepare for a career in law. He’d already tapered off his visits to the Fuller house, and after the exchange on religion, his letters trailed off too. “Ah weakness of the strong,” Margaret wrote in her autobiographical story of Mariana, who returned from boarding school to fall in love, instantly, with Sylvain, a man she believed to be her equal “in the paths of passion and action”: “everything about him was rich and soft” and “of a noble character.” But—“it is a curse to woman to love first, or most.”
Margaret had loved George Davis both first
and
most. Had Davis loved her at all?