Taking a ten-day vacation in Bristol, Rhode Island, in August, at the home of an old friend from Miss Prescott’s school, Mary Soley DeWolfe, who had married a wealthy descendant of the triangle-trade baron James DeWolfe (“the richest and the worst” of those slave traders, as was commonly known), Margaret was able to revive some of the carefree feelings she enjoyed when her own family’s fortunes were more stable. She put aside her foreign language texts and read a biography of Sir Walter Scott that she found in the “ill stocked” library of the mansion house, rode in an open carriage up gently sloping Mount Hope (part of her host’s extensive properties) for a view of Narragansett Bay, stretched out to rest on boulders at the seashore, and, with Mary, narrowly escaped a trampling by a charging stallion pastured on the estate—they drew their parasols in self-defense. It was all delightful, but Margaret was fully aware that her friend must see her as “destitute of all she thinks valuable”: “beauty, money, fixed station in society.” Occupied with matters of dress and household decoration, the teasing yet gracious Mary DeWolfe was “ignorant of my mental compensations”—the satisfaction that Margaret, the only “live wire” in the DeWolfe household that week, took in study and conversation with intellectual companions. Mary, even more than Margaret, was distressed that her guest was “unsustained” and “uncertain as to the future.”
Visiting the “fine houses” of the rich “makes my annoyances seem light” compared to the tiresome burdens of wealth, Margaret would eventually conclude. She had come far enough not to wish herself back again; experience had taught her “how much characters require the discipline of difficult circumstances” to develop their full powers. Would she have achieved the little so far to her credit without the spur of necessity? “I am safer,” she believed, for “I do not sleep on roses,” and a vacation among the rich “will not last long enough to spoil me.” She would continue to savor weeks of recuperation from overwork at the homes of her more prosperous friends without compunction, never minding that she could not reciprocate. What troubled her far more than her lack of funds and the uncertainty of her position were the real limits imposed upon her sex, both by external prohibitions on schooling and employment and by the self-restraint that women learned and internalized: “A man’s ambition with a woman’s heart.—’Tis an accursed lot,” she wrote in her journal at summer’s end.
In the final weeks of August, Margaret devised a plan to unite the two—her professional ambitions and her concerns on behalf of women. She borrowed the idea from Bronson Alcott, who since losing his Temple School had taken up an itinerant “Ministry of Talking,” as he called it, leading conversations for adults on the spiritual topics that had gotten him into trouble in the classroom—and getting paid for it. Margaret determined to try the same with a class of adult women in Boston. Her aim was more practical than spiritual, however: to “ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action,” as she wrote in a letter to Sophia Ripley, proposing a series of weekly “Conversations” to begin in the fall of 1839 and continue through the spring, if interest remained strong. She asked both Sophia Ripley and Elizabeth Peabody to help her gather a “circle” of women “desirous to answer the great questions. What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” Too often, Margaret observed, thinking perhaps of her mother or the aged women in the Groton cabin, it is only when “their best years are gone by” that women begin to ask these questions—too late to profit from the answers.
Margaret had been asking the “great” questions of herself since childhood—“How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?”—struggling “under these limitations of time and space and human nature” to find answers. But in adulthood the scope of her questions had widened to take in all women, as she recognized how much even her answers had to do with her sex. In the years since Timothy’s death, as she was thrown upon her own devices in a “time and space” inhospitable to a woman of ambition, she could no longer see herself as a proxy oldest son, no longer imagine herself an oarsman in the Aeneid, pulling toward victory—nor did she want to. She longed to experience life with her “woman’s heart.”
Still, her plan was to make the classics—in particular classical myth—the focus of discussion. She wanted other women to feel the impulse to action she’d received from these tales as a child drawn to stories of Greek and Roman vitality rather than to parables of Christian piety and submission. Her passion for Greco-Roman myth had only been heightened through her German studies when she discovered that Goethe and Schiller, whose adulatory poem “The Gods of Greece” she knew well, also viewed Apollo, Jupiter, Venus, and Minerva as exemplars of human virtues, or, as Margaret herself phrased it, “great instincts—or ideas—or facts of the internal constitution separated & personified.” As she wrote to Cary Sturgis, “These Greeks no more merged the human in the divine than the divine in the human.” In them, the real and the ideal were united, thought and deed fused in the “active soul” Margaret wished to become. “I cannot live without mine own particular star; but my foot is on the earth and I wish to walk over it until my wings be grown.” Despite painful seasons of self-doubt or retreat from the workaday world into illness, Margaret reveled in the “majesty of earth”: “its roaring sea that dashes against the crag—I love its sounding cataract, its lava rush, its whirlwind, its rivers” as much as the distant, serene “blue sky” of the ideal. “I will use my microscope as well as my telescope.”
The radicalism of Margaret’s plan would be evident to anyone at the time. Boys read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, his exuberant accounts in Latin of the lusty Greek gods and goddesses (the best source of these tales before Thomas Bulfinch’s English translations, The Age of Fable, appeared in 1855). Girls did not. Margaret, with her boy’s education and full immersion in German Romantic “mythomania,” had stories to tell and lessons to draw from them that few of her adult female contemporaries knew or could access.
More radical still was her intention to promote an open discussion in which all participants could freely “state their doubts and difficulties with hope of gaining aid from the experience or aspirations of others.” As with her advanced class at the Greene Street School, Margaret would insist that each woman be “willing to communicate what was in her mind.” This was, she wrote elsewhere, “an age of consciousness” —an “era of experiment,” of “illumination” —and she was determined that the women of her circle experience the gains that the men of the Transcendental Club fraternity derived from focused group discussion, whether or not their essential subject was woman. She would bring them together “undefended by rouge or candlelight,” dispense with the pointless, artificial conventions of feminine parlor chat—“digressing into personalities or commonplaces,” in a word, gossip—and require instead a “simple & clear effort for expression.”
Some might at first “learn by blundering,” but Margaret hoped all the women would eventually discover in themselves the capacity “to question, to define, to state and examine their opinions,” to “systemize” their thought and achieve “a precision in which our sex are so deficient.” This was the verbal exactitude that Margaret had learned from her lawyer father, which caused many who heard her speak extemporaneously to identify her mind as “masculine”; without it, she knew, most women felt “inferior” when it came to entering “the business of life.” Even the most rigorous young ladies’ academies provided “few inducements to test and classify” information taken in. After receiving a superficial education in a girls’ school, many women now lacked even “that practical good sense & mother wisdom & wit which grew up with our grandmothers at the spinning wheel.” Margaret’s Conversations would provide those needed inducements, and Margaret herself would serve as the model for “application of knowledge” in speech, the all-important first step toward action.
Margaret relied on that “magic about
me which draws other spirits,” as well as on the practical aid of Sophia Ripley and Elizabeth Peabody, whose historical classes for adult women through the 1830s had set a precedent, to gather her class. Soon twenty-five women had bought ten-dollar tickets for an initial thirteen-week series, a rate of pay about two thirds of Waldo Emerson’s take for a similar course of lectures. The high sum signaled both the value Margaret placed on the enterprise and her own refusal to assume an “inferior” position when it came to conducting the “business of life.” The class included three Sturgis sisters—Anna, Ellen, and Cary, the older two married to the Hooper brothers Sam and Robert, heirs to a Boston mercantile fortune; Elizabeth Bancroft, the wife of the historian George Bancroft; Mary Jane Quincy, the wife of future Boston mayor Josiah Quincy Jr. and daughter-in-law of Harvard president Josiah Quincy; Margaret’s longtime friend Lydia Maria Child; and an assortment of Elizabeth Peabody’s friends and former students.
Elizabeth offered her sister Mary’s rented room at 1 Chauncy Place, a few blocks east of the Common, for the Wednesday midday sessions. Mary was out during the day, teaching school, although she could join the class after morning lessons. Participants who traveled to Boston from other towns—as Elizabeth did from Salem—could combine Margaret’s Conversation with Waldo Emerson’s Wednesday-evening lecture. His 1839–40 series on the “Present Age,” a paean to the era of experiment that Margaret’s Conversations were helping to usher in, began several weeks after Margaret’s opening session on November 6, 1839.
Of course many women signed on just to hear Margaret Fuller talk. Waldo Emerson, who’d been treated to her sallies over dinner, in his parlor, and on walks in the Concord woods, considered Margaret’s “the most entertaining conversation in America.” James Clarke also thought Margaret’s verbal powers unequaled: her speech was “finished and true as the most deliberate rhetoric of the pen,” but always had “an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment,—the result of some organic provision that made finished sentences as natural to her as blundering and hesitation are to most of us.”
If she’d been a man, Margaret might have become a popular lecturer, perhaps even more successful than Waldo, who persisted in reading his essays from manuscript pages, using the lecture hall as a workroom for his books rather than a performance space. But, bold as she was as a thinker and writer, Margaret never considered mounting the podium, despite her extraordinary capacity for extemporaneous speech. In 1839, only a few fervent abolitionist women dared to cross that barrier, stirring up outrage wherever they held forth, as much for speaking in public as for their reformist views. Margaret still clung to the few vestiges of Boston prestige that remained to her, and she continued to emulate an Old World gentility, the elegance she had admired in Ellen Kilshaw and refined under Eliza Farrar’s direction. Situating her Conversations in a private household—even a Boston schoolteacher’s boarding house—and offering them to a handpicked audience underscored her belief that conversation was an art as well as an impetus to action, and implied that hers was an elite company, such as Madame de Staël’s salon or London’s Blue Stocking Club. Nevertheless, her sessions soon gained the reputation of “a kind of infidel association,” an appraisal that was at least half accurate: the Conversations were more of a club than a class.
For Margaret did not want to be listened to; she “dreaded” the feeling of being on “display,” like “a paid Corinne,” the heroine of a novel by de Staël who entertained parlor audiences as an improvisatrice, holding forth on the splendors of Italian art. She wanted to serve as the “nucleus of conversation,” only “one to give her own best thoughts on any subject that was named, as a means of calling out the thoughts of others.” If the group was a circle, she would be “its moving spring.” She laid out her plan to the assembled women on that first Wednesday in November and waited for the second meeting, she wrote to Waldo Emerson, for “the real trial of whether they will talk themselves.”
She needn’t have worried. As Margaret launched into a description of Greek mythology as “playful as well as deep” and remarked on the “joyous life” of the Greeks themselves—“we sometimes could not but envy them submerged as we are in analysis & sentiment”—Mary Jane Quincy grew alarmed. Mrs. Quincy spoke with “wonder & some horror at the thought of Christians enjoying Heathen Greeks” and expressed the opinion that Greek myths were “gross & harmful superstitions.” Margaret was forced to clarify: “She had no desire to go back,” but she refused to “look upon the expression of a great nation’s intellect as a series of idle fancies.” Greek culture had achieved maturity, whereas “Christian cultivation was in its infancy”—evidently an unfamiliar notion to Mary Jane Quincy, but one that seemed to convince. These “fables & forms of Gods,” Margaret continued, represented the “universal sentiments of religion—aspiration—intellectual action of a people whose political & aesthetic life had become immortal.” Margaret urged the class to approach Greek culture “with respect—& distrust our own contempt of it.”
From then on, Margaret encountered little resistance. She steered the group toward talk of Apollo, “the embodiment of the element of genius,” and outlined the “Greek idea” of the human mind, “its characteristics, its actions, its destiny.” Near the end of the two-hour period, she posed questions, among them “how far the possession of genius was compatible with—or assistant to happiness & virtue.” As one woman wrote afterward, “though these great questions were not settled it was useful to discuss them.” The plan was taking effect.
The Conversations continued in succeeding weeks with Venus—discussed “not as the Goddess of Love but as the Goddess of Beauty”—and then the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which “Miss Fuller told . . . with a grace & beauty that was of itself an exquisite delight.” Here was one of Ovid’s more risqué tales, with deep resonance for women: beauty, love, sex, and marriage all come into question in the story of Venus’s jealousy of Psyche, the most beautiful of three sisters, and Venus’s efforts to interfere with her son Cupid’s love for the mortal girl. Unmarried despite her beauty, Psyche is offered up to an invisible lover—a monster, she is told, whom she must never look at when he visits her at night in the palace where she is held captive. The unseen lover, whom Psyche comes to care for and accept as her husband, is the handsome Cupid, of course, and when Psyche, taunted by her jealous sisters who envy her the palace, opens her eyes one night and discovers the truth, Cupid and Psyche must separate. The angry Venus subjects Psyche to trials—a journey to the underworld, a box full of temptations—but Cupid returns to defy his mother and take Psyche as his wife, making her immortal.
Margaret played the story several ways for her audience, rendering it first as a proto-Christian fable. The myth of Cupid and Psyche, Margaret explained, “set forth the universal fact of the trial of the soul on earth, its purification by means of the sufferings its own mistakes bring upon it, & its final redemption & immortality.” Then questions came from the class. “Why was it wrong in Psyche to wish to see & know her husband? Do we not wish to understand our happiness? . . . Is the desire of knowledge sin?” Then, “What do her sisters represent?” and what of “Venus’ enmity”? And how much analysis “was inevitable, how much was desirable, what was excessive,” in dealings with loved ones?
Now Margaret suggested a Romantic’s version of the tale, as if it were a story line from a novel of Goethe about the unfolding of the soul: the myth traced Psyche’s progress from “credulous simplicity,” she suggested, to understanding and, finally, transcendence. Psyche’s first “innocent” love failed its test, leading her on to further earthly trials and at last a “divine,” enduring love founded on knowledge gained through experience. Still, one woman recorded later, “Many questions were started that were not answered.” Just what Margaret hoped for: another success in provocation.
In later sessions, when discussion stalled or became diffuse, Margaret required papers on the topic, as when Maria Child proposed, on the Wednesday assigned to
Minerva, goddess of wisdom, that “wisdom was the union of the affections & understanding.” So many women argued that “the principle of Beauty” should be added to the definition that Margaret halted the conversation and declared, “We should never get along till we had defined Beauty.” The earlier class on Venus as the embodiment of beauty had not sufficed; Margaret asked each woman to give her own definition on the spot. Caroline Sturgis answered that beauty was “the attractive power—the central unifying power.” Marianne Jackson, a former student of Elizabeth Peabody and daughter of Judge Charles Jackson, said it was “the Infinite apprehended,” and Anna Shaw, herself a noted beauty, replied that “it was the Infinite revealed in the finite.” Margaret objected: Truth or love could be defined the same way. How was beauty different? Then Sophia Ripley suggested that beauty “was the aspect of the all. It was the mode in which truth appeared.” In the end, “the conversation was left unfinished & deferred to the next time—each was asked to bring a written definition of Beauty.”
The result was twenty essays that Margaret considered “rather little poems about Beauty (& every one good) than definitions of Beauty.” As she wrote to Waldo Emerson, the women “kept clinging to details.” The exercise inspired a new tack, a session devoted to “seeking out some sound principles of criticism” so the women could learn to build logical arguments in their essays. Conversation drifted to the difference between “imagination” and “fancy.” “We found ourselves so vague in the use of these words,” one woman recorded in her diary, that again Margaret assigned a paper. She read these aloud in the following session, commented on them, and then required “all of us” to comment as well. Increasingly now, Margaret set aside mythology for direct confrontation of the “great questions.” The “value of suffering to the intellectual as well as the moral character” was debated in the tenth meeting, and later, “what is inspiration?” By the close of the first thirteen sessions in midwinter, no one wanted the class to end; a second series began immediately. “Woman” was on the agenda.
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