This was what she preserved in the manuscript: the implicit presence of her father, both resented and loved, in her thought as a girl. “As nothing more widely distinguishes man from man than energy of will,” Margaret begins, “so can nothing be more interesting than an inquiry into the nature of that enthusiastic confidence in the future which is a chief element of this will.” Surely the forthright statement, an endorsement of democratic striving and Yankee zeal, pleased her father. Timothy suggests that she substitute “energy” for the final word, “will,” for the sake of clarity; and he questions the phrase “in the future.” Timothy’s query teaches Margaret this about her father: he too is anxious. Can the “high scholar,” the striving lawyer and politician, maintain his position by force of will? There is no choice but to summon the “energy” to try.
“Imagination is necessary to this confidence,” Margaret continues; imagination enables us to apprehend beauty and to “enliven our hearts” once we have attained our goals. But imagination “cannot nerve the will to perseverance,” she admonishes her reader (and herself, perhaps), cannot support the “unwearied climbing and scrambling” necessary to accomplishment. Years later, Margaret came to understand that her father “had no conception of the subtle and indirect motions of imagination and feeling,” had “no belief in minds that listen, wait, and receive.” The girl Margaret’s mistrust of the imagination, of her imagination, was her father’s.
And “so I must put on the fetters,” she recalled of her unwearying scramble up the hill of knowledge as defined by Timothy: “I had no natural childhood.” At a younger age than Ellen Kilshaw, Margaret learned to live two lives, safeguarding her imagination, her listening, feeling self: “My own world sank deep within.” And that “true life was only the dearer” for being “secluded . . . veiled over by a thick curtain”—not a mantle of courtesy, like Ellen’s, but a mantle of “intellect.”
Most telling of all, “man” is the subject of Margaret’s essay—not generic “mankind,” but man, not woman. Napoleon, Michelangelo, Demosthenes, Brutus are her examples of energetic will. “I thought with rapture of the all-accomplished man, him of the many talents, wide resources, clear sight, and omnipotent will,” she recalled of the years spent in her father’s home school. At age nine she had written a page called “Beauties of Nature,” enumerating the delights of garden, hill, cavern, and sea, concluding, “What employment [is] so noble as that of a naturalist. How must his mind be exalted and ennobled.”
Negative examples, those who falter, are men too: “The coward never enters the lists,—the weakling failing once never enters them again.” “Possunt quia posse videntur” is an essay about the power of the will, confidence in the future, written by an ambitious little girl who has learned that men are heroes, who must imagine herself, though her imagination is suspect, into the forward-looking conclusion she herself has written, a sentence that shows “very plainly” what she has to say on her own, although that sentence excludes her: “It is not in the power of circumstance to prevent the earnest will from shaping round itself the character of a great, a wise, or a good man.”
One sentence allows for an ambiguous subject, neither male nor female, a sentence that speaks of learning from defeat, of redoubled effort: “The truly strong of will returns invigorated by the contest, calmed, not saddened by failure and wiser from its nature.” Margaret has learned to rebound from her father’s criticism; she has, she believes, “too much strength to be crushed.” Those heroes were not who she could become, but she “loved to conquer obstacles, and fed my youth and strength for their sake,” she would later recall. It will be many years before that girl envisions womanly valor, attains a “fulness of beautiful certainty”—before she makes her voyage to “Madeira,” bearing her mantle of intellect not as a cloak but as a shield. Always she will strive, manfully, though she is a girl, and later a woman.
Now Margaret’s hidden self spoke, beyond her control. By night she was “a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism.” She dreamed of walking in her mother’s funeral procession, dreams inspired by her reading of the Aeneid: “of horses trampling over her,” of “trees that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get out” as the bloody tide rose over her feet, then higher, finally reaching her lips, threatening her ability to speak, to cry for help, to live. She walked in her sleep, moaning, till her father found her, shook her awake, and, when she confessed her nightmare visions, ordered her “sharply” to “leave off thinking of such nonsense.” The man who leveled jealous accusations at his wife on the basis of one dream brushed aside his daughter’s recurring nightmares as nonsense—“never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night” by keeping her up long past any normal child’s bedtime for late-night recitations, by forcing her through Virgil’s lurid battle scenes, by inciting a rivalry between his “pair of Ms.” Finally, to everyone’s relief, Timothy sent Margaret to school.
At nine and ten Margaret walked down Cherry Street and around the corner each day to the newly opened Cambridge Port Private Grammar School with her brother Eugene, now six. There, in an arrangement unusual for the time, boys preparing for Harvard and girls with progressive-minded parents studied together, although seated in separate “classes,” facing each other from benches on opposite sides of the room. Margaret, the girl with “no natural childhood,” who “came with the reputation of being ‘smart,’” as one classmate remembered, nevertheless made friends with Harriet Fay, one of the few girls on Cherry Street whose parents also favored a classical education for their daughter, and with several other girls who walked the mile and a half from high-minded Old Cambridge or across the river from Brookline and Boston.
Boys noticed her, not always favorably. Young Oliver Wendell Holmes, who found the fair-haired Harriet Fay “a revelation” of feminine charms, remembered Margaret, by contrast, as exhibiting an “air to her schoolmates [that] was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them.” But again, Margaret was justified in holding this view of herself. She had come to school adept in translating Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil, the Latin texts her classmates were studying, and her compositions in English were closely reasoned and distinctive—original, as her mother had noted. The eleven-year-old Holmes chanced on a copy of one of Margaret’s essays and began to read “with a certain emulous interest,” hoping to find that his own written work was better—after all, he was a full year older. Margaret’s essay began, “‘It is a trite remark’ . . . I stopped. Alas! I did not know what trite meant.” For the future physician and poet, the evidence of Margaret’s “superiority” was a “crushing discovery.” That Margaret so quickly “got ahead of me” was likely the reason young Holmes derided her “long, flexile neck”—that slouch—and the “aqua-marine lustre” in her squinting eyes. What the boy didn’t know was that Margaret also kept watch on competitors, usually older ones. When Margaret learned that “Miss Mary Elliot went through Virgil in thirty days,” she determined to study “with renewed vigor.”
But Margaret did not stay long at the Port School, as it was nicknamed by its pupils. Timothy had begun to hear of her “deficiencies” in “female propriety, & disposition,” and he wanted a girls’ school for his daughter. Margaret herself was uncomfortable with her body as it grew more womanly, lacing herself into too small dresses in hopes of containing the feminine flesh, making her seem “very corpulent,” one boy judged harshly. Once while visiting the house of a school friend, a maid had to be summoned to tighten the corset strings when her dress came undone. Now it wasn’t just her intellect that made her seem much older than she was; it was her body. Entering her teens, Margaret was a “robust” girl who “passed for eighteen or twenty.”
Although her mother argued for a boarding school in suburban Jamaica Plain that emphasized “polite forms of etiquette in social life,” Timothy instead chose, at Margaret’s urging, the most academically rigor
ous girls’ academy in Boston, Dr. Park’s Lyceum for Young Ladies, a day school across the river on Beacon Hill’s Mount Vernon Street. There Margaret could continue her Latin and English composition, and add Italian, French, history, geography, geometry and trigonometry, and the natural sciences. As for the social graces, she began lessons at a nearby dancing school, which brought regular invitations to cotillions. Now her love of strenuous exercise had an outlet, and the physically mature girl soon found herself dancing with “grown up gentlemen”—to her parents’ distress. Might she “display” her “attainments” too soon? But Margaret felt more comfortable conversing with college men, and even the handful of college professors who sometimes appeared, than with schoolboys.
In the classroom, Margaret gravitated to older girls as well, although less as friends than as objects of the competitive zeal fostered by Dr. Park’s teaching methods: here was an opportunity to “conquer obstacles.” At the end of each week, the student with the highest marks in a particular subject was awarded a medal and became the “head” of that class. A girl who collected twenty-one medals would earn the coveted “eye of Intelligence,” the Lyceum’s highest honor. Fourteen-year-old Susan Channing, niece of the eminent Reverend William Ellery Channing, had earned an impressive seventeen medals during her three months in the school previous to Margaret’s arrival. But this didn’t stop eleven-year-old Margaret from vowing to take the head in English away from Susan and rack up her own twenty-one in as short a time—and she did.
Once again, a reputation for genius, if somewhat distorted, had preceded her and grew with her accomplishments. Margaret was that “prodigy of talent and accomplishment” and that “wonderful child at Dr. Park’s school, talking pure mathematics with her father, at 12 years.” Her forthright manner and awkward appearance may have contributed to another impression circulating: the girl “had not religion.” Margaret certainly made no effort to exhibit conventional piety in conversation or demeanor; anyone who heard her talk knew that Greek and Roman heroes, not Christian saints, were her lodestars. Her precocious reading of adult novels put her beyond the experience, at least imaginatively, of her peers and even many grown women.
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.”
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Mariana
A DISFIGURING RED “FLUSH” ROSE TO HER CHEEKS AND forehead, and would not go away. Timothy believed the “eruption” on Margaret’s f
ace 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.”
Margaret Fuller Page 4
