Miss Fuller (6 page)

There are difficulties and we will probably not succeed in finding what we came for. I am staying for a week or so more to walk and hunt for specimens. Tell Mother. I have notes on birds and other beach life and will bring you shells and a skate’s egg-sac called a devil’s purse. It is empty, but do not let that give you false comfort. The devil grows richer every day.

H.

Henry hired the oysterman to take him to Mattituck, on the North Fork of Long Island. He spent several days there, boarding with a farmer, and continued his walks and his notes. On his last day, he returned to Fire Island and watched the dogged, nearly finished haulage of the marble.
Most of the stone was in rough slabs, but there were also two out-sized marble statues, a man standing and a man on a horse, lying, bizarrely, on the sand. By looking more closely, he realized that the block faces had been left unsculpted — evidently these stone figures were basic models of the heroic, meant to be adapted locally once they had reached their destinations, some county seat court-house, some new library or athenaeum in Ohio or Maryland. They shared the feature of having the right arm raised. The solitary man pointed to an indefinite future — for the moment, as he reclined on the wet sand, to the clouds above the beach. The figure on horseback had suffered more from the wreck: The horse’s neck and head were gone and the man’s extended arm was broken off at the elbow, making his intended gesture less clear.

The police-man had vanished, and so had the pickers. But the sailor Bolton dropped his work and came over to tell Henry that one of the locals had been offering something for sale, papers he thought, from the wreck. He directed him to a fishing shack which stood close by the grave-yard.

The family had decided that no further moving could take place until Henry was home. In the lull, Anne visited the widow Allan at her two-room shack down by the creek, where she tended her vegetable garden and took in washing
and mending. Dolly Allan’s own children were grown and gone, and she had worked for the family as house-maid and nurse-maid when Anne was little. Anne had tried for years to educate her; and although she no longer tried, she still read to her.

That day she brought with her Margaret Fuller’s
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
. As she held the delicate volume in her hand, she thought how much more discreet and seemly than its author the object was. Dolly was pulling weeds; Anne set down her book and basket — which contained a thick slice of ham, a loaf of bread, and a cup of cream as well as a jar of lemonade — and bent to help her.

Inside, they put the food away. Anne opened the jar and poured the lemonade into cups as Dolly washed at the sink pump. They settled into their usual postures: Anne with the book on a cushion on the floor, Dolly sitting on a chair behind her, embracing her with her knees. The old woman unpinned and unbraided the young woman’s light brown hair. As Anne read, Dolly combed and stroked, dipped her comb into rose-petal water, combed the hair through, braided it, unbraided it, twisted it up and pinned it, then unpinned it and combed it some more. Anne propped her elbow on Dolly’s knee; the older woman’s cotton skirt was patterned with green sprigs, faded to the same hue as the book.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century
had made Miss Fuller famous. It had made it possible for her to go to England,
where the book had excited admiration; and to France and Italy, where it had appeared in translations almost immediately. But Anne had never read it. She found that the style took some getting used to. She thought, as she paused occasionally to make sense of what she had just read aloud, that it was not exactly flowery — but rather somehow vegetal, vine-like, even mouldy, each sentence adhering around some central idea, with examples.

In clear triumphant moments, many times, has rung through the spheres the prophecy of his [man’s] jubilee, and those moments, though past in time, have been translated into eternity by thought; the bright signs they left hang in the heavens, as single stars or constellations, and, already, a thickly sown radiance consoles the wanderer in the darkest night. Other heroes since Hercules have fulfilled the zodiac of beneficent labors, and then given up their mortal part to the fire without a murmur; while no God dared deny that they should have their reward.

Miss Fuller began with an invocation of Man’s capacity for the heroic, and went on to explain that Man cannot be fully heroic until Woman is allowed to be heroic beside him. In her first intimation of the main argument, she wrote of women that:

Those who till a spot of earth scarcely larger than is wanted for a grave, have deserved that the sun should shine upon its sod till violets answer.

Anne looked up from the book and said, “That’s elegant. It sounds a lot like Henry.”

“All done?” asked Dolly, making a final twist and pinning Anne’s hair back into place.

“It goes on forever, actually. I’ll bring something more lively next time. You need your nap.”

She settled Dolly on her low bed.

“How is the moving coming along?” Dolly asked.

“Hectic — Mother throwing her hands in the air and shouting, and Father trying to pull the stove out of the wall. We hope Henry will come home soon to supervise.”

“You need a home of your own.”

“I know I do,” said Anne. “But I almost feel that I shouldn’t. Helen and John never had the chance to marry. Henry and Sissy — they both say they will never marry.”

“But you must.”

It was too hot for a blanket, even with all the shutters closed against the sun. Anne kissed the old woman’s cheek and smoothed her sparse white hair.

“I’ll do your hair next time.” It was an old joke.

“If you undo it, it will fly away.”

Back at home, Anne returned to the book with reluctance. Guilt about her dislike of Margaret — would she call
her Margaret at last, now that she was dead? — made her disinclination to wade through those sentences feel like an actual crime. So she would read.

Miss Fuller argued for the need to explore the full capacities of both men and women. Ah, this was familiar. She acknowledged that most women would continue to be womanly, and interested in domestic affairs; but she also maintained that in such a time as this nineteenth century, when women have unjustly lost much liberty by having lost their property rights (such as they had known in early centuries and in different cultures), it behooved more women to turn to what she termed their “Minerva” side. Minerva again! Minerva represented the wise, masculine aspect of femininity. By allowing Minerva to flourish, she said, women could accomplish a redress of the bad bargain that currently prohibited women from exploring their male strengths (of leadership, courage, invention), or men from exploring their female strengths (of kindness, spirituality, nurturance). This was exactly the same language of the Conversations. But the next passage went further:

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.… We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres would ensue.…

The sexes should not only correspond to and appreciate, but prophesy to one another. In individual instances this happens. Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.…

When Emily Plater [a hero of the Polish independence movement] joined the army where the reports of her exploits preceded her … some of the officers were disappointed at her quiet manners; that she had not the air and tone of a stage-heroine. They thought she could not have acted heroically unless in buskins; had no idea that such deeds only showed the habit of her mind.

Others talked of the delicacy of her sex, advised her to withdraw from perils and dangers, and had no comprehension of the feelings within her breast that made this impossible.… But though, to the mass of these men, she was an embarrassment and a puzzle, the nobler sort viewed her with a tender enthusiasm worthy of her.…

Mercy! She closed the book; she would help fix supper.

Sieving the creamed potato soup — Anne had proposed they try it cold in the French way — she asked Mother and Sissy if they had ever heard of Emily Plater. Mother said, as
she had often before: “Women and war are an abominable combination. Joan of Arc — or your Emily Plater — are stories to sicken any woman of right feeling.” She slammed the stove door for emphasis. Whatever the weather, they would have the biscuits hot.

That night, unable to sleep in the heat, Anne felt herself still whirling inside what she had read. She was wearied by the tortured way that Fuller’s argument ranged, without apparent logic or — well, control. What was it about the philosophers (she excepted Henry of course, and anyway he disdained the label) that made them argue in circles, moreover in circles that kept expanding indefinitely? It was as if they were looping out into the future, including everyone now and forever. She lit the candle and continued to read.

The electrical, the magnetic element in woman has not been fairly brought out in any period. Every thing might be expected from it; she has far more of it than man. This is commonly expressed by saying that her intuitions are more rapid and more correct.…

Women who combine this with creative genius, are very commonly unhappy at present. They see too much to act in conformity with those around them.…

Those, who seem overladen with electricity, frighten those around them.… Woe to such a woman who finds herself linked to a [petty] man in bonds too close. It is the cruelest of errors. He will detest her with all the bitterness of wounded self-love. He will take the whole prejudice of manhood upon himself, and to the utmost of his power imprison and torture her by its imperious rigors.

Now the writer was getting angry; her prose was jabbing at the reader. She gave examples of electrical women — Iphigenia, Cassandra — who frightened men and so were killed off.

I observe in [Cassandra’s] case, and in one known to me here, that, what might have been a gradual and gentle disclosure of remarkable powers, was broken and jarred into disease by an unsuitable marriage.

You ask, what use will [woman] make of liberty, when she has so long been sustained and restrained?

Anne liked that — the false logic of sound, as if
sustained
and
restrained
were inseparable; the one the price of the other. Or perhaps the logic was not false.

 … If you ask me what offices she may fill; I reply — any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will.

“Sea-captains!” Anne said it aloud.

I do not doubt there are women well fitted for such an office, and if so, I should be glad to see them in it …

I wish woman to live, first for God’s sake. Then she will not make an imperfect man her god, and thus sink to idolatry.… A profound thinker has said, “no married woman can represent the female world, for she belongs to her husband. The idea of woman must be represented by a virgin.”

It was not clear to Anne if the “profound thinker” was Emerson, or possibly Carlyle or Goethe. But the Free Woman must resist all male gods, all male authorities, including her own father and her husband:

But that is the very fault of marriage, and of the present relation between the sexes, that woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him.… It is a vulgar error …