Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  But with Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” at its center, “pleading . . . affinity with the celestial orbs,” The Dial proved to be quite “bad” enough. One reviewer after another targeted Alcott’s list of aphorisms as emblematic of the journal’s all too free spirit—“infidelity in its higher branches,” as a writer for the Boston Times charged. Waldo’s plan of granting the “Sayings” a full byline left The Dial vulnerable to attack as the “ravings of Alcott, and his fellow-zanies.” Failing to notice Margaret’s opening essay on criticism or the journal’s distinctive reporting on the arts, reviewers instead focused on and reviled what they’d expected to find in The Dial: “its religion,” which, “if not all moonshine, is something worse.” A “sickly, fungous literature” was how one reviewer described what the Boston Times concluded was an “unintelligible” and “grossly compounded mixture of Swedenborgianism, German mysticism . . . [and] Pantheism.”

  Still others charged that the journal prized “imagination” over “cool, substantial deduction of ratiocination” and served as nothing more than a vent for its writers’ “inappeasable longings.” A reviewer for the Providence Daily Journal ferreted out the identities of the issue’s unnamed contributors and then lobbed predictable insults: Waldo Emerson had betrayed his calling, and Margaret Fuller was “a woman of extraordinary application and industry,” yet with “no genuine love of knowledge . . . for its own sake, but for the eclat with which it is attended.” This brilliant, willful female had once again overstepped the boundaries of decorum simply to feed her vanity. A lone note of approval came from Horace Greeley’s New-Yorker: here, at last, was a “really new Magazine.”

  But private voices told of a more grateful response. The Dial, Margaret began to hear, “brings meat and drink to sundry famishing men and women at a distance from these tables”—the fractious dinner party of Boston doctrinal dispute. As John Sullivan Dwight later wrote, The Dial succeeded in telling “the time of days so far ahead” it could not help but invite scorn. If the journal was, in the eyes of its critics, “one of the most . . . ridiculous productions of the age,” that meant it had managed to “explode,” as Waldo Emerson had hoped, “all the established rules of Grub Street or Washington Street,” Boston’s own publishers’ row. “Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism,” Waldo was pleased to report to his friend Thomas Carlyle in England. The Dial—“poor little thing”—had been “honoured by attacks from almost every newspaper & magazine.” Waldo’s chief request of Margaret for the succeeding issue was to alter the typeface on the cover so that “the word Dial” would appear in “strong black letters that can be seen in the sunshine . . . Can we not print it a little large & glorious . . . ?”

  Margaret postponed a second installment of Alcott’s “Sayings” to a later issue (she refused to scuttle the project), but otherwise the core writers remained the same, and others joined in: Henry Hedge, with the essay “The Art of Life—The Scholar’s Calling,” and Cary Sturgis, with a sheaf of poems that she elected to publish under the initial “Z.” Waldo wrote a flattering introduction to a selection of poetry—“honest, great, but crude”—by another new young friend, Ellery Channing, cousin to William but of an altogether different temperament. As erratic as William was earnest, Ellery scribbled verses by the ream, but cared little whether they appeared in print, leaving it to Waldo to choose the best and then refusing his editorial advice. Persuaded by Margaret to support her aesthetic agenda, Waldo contributed a substantial essay of his own, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” and tolerated her editorial nudging on a difficult passage: “I think when you look again you will think you have not said what you meant to say.” Margaret reviewed the Athenaeum gallery’s latest exhibition, recognizing in particular two landscapes by Sarah Clarke that “deserve greater attention than from their size and position [in the gallery] they are likely to receive.”

  As the second Dial appeared in October 1840, Margaret took over the lease on the Willow Brook property in Jamaica Plain, to live for the first time in “my own hired house.” The two oldest Fuller brothers, William Henry and Eugene, had recently married and settled in New Orleans, where their mother planned to spend the winter. Ellen left for Louisville to look for work as a schoolteacher; Arthur was at Harvard; and Richard, now sixteen, had taken a job with a dry-goods firm in Boston. Margaret had given up the three boarding students she’d been supervising through the previous year and now had only fourteen-year-old Lloyd to look after, assigning herself “the task of civilizing” the still restive boy “this winter.” Her newfound independence and near solitude brought a feeling of “peace” and “almost happiness,” Margaret wrote to Waldo Emerson in November.

  Expecting soon to be earning a salary for her work on The Dial—Waldo predicted that the journal would become “better and perhaps next year bigger”—Margaret also put her faith in a new series of Conversations. A smaller but “truly interested” group of women began meeting in Elizabeth Peabody’s recently established “Foreign Library,” a bookstore and subscription library specializing in imported books and magazines, which occupied the first floor of a rented brick row house on West Street, a half-block from the Common and around the corner from Washington Street. The Peabody family lived upstairs, where Mary taught school and Sophia painted and sculpted in her bedroom-studio. The bookroom itself had quickly become a meeting place for Transcendental Club members, who gathered there in new configurations after a contentious last session at West Street in September. At the end of four years of haphazardly scheduled meetings, the group had disbanded to pursue separate aims: Margaret, Waldo, and Bronson Alcott were committed to The Dial; others to the reform of the Unitarian Church from within; and still others, in particular George Ripley, who’d dramatically resigned his Boston pulpit the previous spring, to found new freethinking congregations.

  Elizabeth Peabody had also begun a publishing business, starting off with the Reverend William Ellery Channing’s anti-slavery tract Emancipation and then engaging Nathaniel Hawthorne for a series of historical tales for children. Elizabeth promised Margaret publication too, of a translation Margaret contemplated of Bettine Brentano von Arnim’s fervid correspondence as a teenager with the somewhat older poet Karoline von Günderode, Die Günderode—a work that displayed, Margaret thought, “all that is lovely between woman and woman.”

  Elizabeth’s offer represented another potential source of income, and the project gave Margaret the excuse to correspond with “Bettine,” as she thought of her already, having read von Arnim’s Correspondence with a Child—letters Bettine exchanged with Goethe in girlhood—in hopes of gathering more information for her biography. Margaret would learn that both the teenage letters and the Goethe correspondence had been substantially rewritten or even fabricated, and she ultimately discounted von Arnim as a source on Goethe. But the illumination of two distinct yet complementary souls in Die Günderode seemed an authentic representation of the worth of friendship, and the possibility that the letters were embroidered for effect hardly mattered. “Our communion was sweet—it was the epoch in which I first became conscious of myself,” ran its epigraph. The suicide of the older Karoline some years after the correspondence, in a period of melancholy after having been jilted by her married lover, while not treated in the book, lent poignance to the earthly “Woman’s heaven” conjured in the letters.

  Some of Margaret’s biographical thoughts on Goethe found their way into the third issue of The Dial, published in January 1841. Responding to the recent publication in English of an attack on Goethe by the German literary critic Wolfgang Menzel, Margaret defended her hero as “a prophet of our own age, as well as a representative of his own.” She might as well have been describing her own ambitions as she assessed the accomplishments of this “agent in history” who had inspired her for over a decade. Goethe, she wrote, was “just enough of an idealist, just enough of a realist, for his peculiar task”—that is, to perform the “office of artist-critic to the then chaot
ic world of thought in his country.” He deserved to be judged apart from the “private gossip” or even the “well-authenticated versions” of his irregular domestic arrangements, which critics like Menzel held against him. Goethe might not meet “the standard of ideal manhood,” Margaret allowed, but it was important to “consider his life as a whole.” His writings alone offered “sufficient evidence of a life of severe labor, steadfast forbearance, and an intellectual growth almost unparalleled.”

  Margaret’s commitment to showcasing the “new spirit” in this third and so far strongest issue of The Dial showed in her decision to reject an essay by Henry Thoreau, “The Service,” that Waldo urged her to print. Margaret wrote to the twenty-three-year-old Thoreau that she hoped to publish the essay eventually, but while it was “rich in thoughts,” in its present form those thoughts “seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain.” Still, she recognized that his “tone” was far superior to the “air of quiet good-breeding” of much of the material submitted to the magazine: “Yours is so rugged that it ought to be commanding.” She pressed him to revise and accepted, instead, another of Thoreau’s poems and three of Waldo’s, including the enigmatic “Sphinx.”

  Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” were defiantly back: “A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God.” And once again Alcott took the brunt of the criticism for the publication, which was otherwise gaining a modicum of acceptance as an “exponent of Literary Liberty.” One reviewer allowed that Alcott’s mystical dicta “need not frighten any body.”

  Margaret invited Theodore Parker to augment her defense of Goethe with a general article on the “most original, fresh, and religious literature of all modern times,” that of the German Romantics; and Sam Ward wrote on Boccaccio and classic Italian literature. Margaret herself reviewed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first volume of children’s stories, Grandfather’s Chair, published by Elizabeth Peabody, taking the opportunity to mete out more general praise: “No one of all our imaginative writers has indicated a genius at once so fine and rich.” She singled out his “power” of “making present the past scenes of our own history” and expressed the hope that Hawthorne would write again for “older and sadder” readers.

  For those readers—The Dial’s readers—Margaret offered still more challenging fare: Sophia Ripley’s essay titled “Woman,” revised after its first presentation to Margaret’s Conversation class the previous year. A searing indictment as closely reasoned as Alcott’s “Sayings” were cryptic, the essay charged that “in our present state of society woman possesses not; she is under possession,” referring to laws that barred married women from owning or inheriting property. From girlhood, “woman is educated with the tacit understanding, that she is only half a being, and an appendage.” Once married, she “spends life in conforming to” her husband’s wishes “instead of moulding herself to her own ideal. Thus she loses her individuality, and never gains his respect.” After becoming a mother, “she is only the upper nurse,” whereas the father is “the oracle. His wish is law, hers only the unavailing sigh uttered in secret.” Through it all, “she looks out into life, finds nothing there but confusion, and congratulates herself that it is man’s business, not hers.”

  “Is this woman’s destiny?” Sophia Ripley demanded in exasperation, seemingly as ready to abandon the role of conventional wife as her husband, George, had been to shed his minister’s robes. Restricting the entire female sex to “a sphere is vain, for no two persons naturally have the same,” she argued. “Character, intellect creates the sphere of each,” not sex, “and this separation is ruinous to the highest improvement of both” men and women. She proposed instead that every woman be “encouraged to question . . . gradually forming her own ideal.” A woman “should still be herself” after marriage, and “her own individuality should be as precious to her” as her husband’s love. She closed provocatively: “Is this the ideal of a perfect woman, and if so, how does it differ from a perfect man?”

  Margaret approached the same subject—a new feminine ideal—from a different perspective in a prose meditation she called “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain.” She improvised on a story she’d heard from a neighbor in Jamaica Plain, Dr. William Eustis, a lonely bachelor in his fifties and an avid amateur horticulturalist, who had stopped in to see Margaret’s mother shortly before Margarett Crane traveled south in October. Nearly dozing on the couch while Eustis droned on, Margaret nevertheless found herself intrigued by the man’s excessively detailed description—“not like a botanist, but a lover”—of his “interview” with a flowering magnolia tree on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, not far from where her mother would soon be living. The tale seemed almost “romantic,” and Margaret began to think of shaping it into a “true poem,” an allegory of an encounter between male and female. What might a female become if allowed by an adoring male to bloom on her own? What might that man learn from her?

  Margaret’s Magnolia has a history to relate when a nameless male traveler follows a strange fragrance and finds her “singing to herself in her lonely bower,” though she scarcely deigns to speak to him. Her wisdom derives from “a being of another order from thee”—“Secret, radiant, profound . . . feminine,” the Magnolia explains, and may not be communicated “in any language now possible betwixt us.” Yet she recalls for him her former life when she was, instead, an orange tree, blooming in “endless profusion,” offering up her fruit to merchants for sale and her blossoms to brides as ornamental garlands, but suffering inwardly: “I had no mine or thine, I belonged to all, I could never rest, I was never at one.” As a bounteous orange tree, hers was the conventional woman’s fate, so well described by Sophia Ripley. It was also Margaret’s, as family caretaker, schoolteacher, Conversation instigator, and nursemaid to The Dial’s sometimes “laggard and lukewarm” contributors.

  But chill weather and exhaustion bring the orange tree’s death—and subsequent rebirth under the influence of that higher feminine power, “the queen and guardian of the flowers.” “Take a step inward . . . become a vestal priestess and bide thy time in the Magnolia,” the frozen tree is told. “I was driven back upon the centre of my being, and there found all being,” the Magnolia concludes her tale. Contrary to Margaret’s long-ago Thanksgiving Day epiphany, that burst of self-renunciation while still under her father’s command, here it was possible to find both self and “All.” In Margaret’s story, the nameless man rides on after the flower bids him “farewell, to meet again in prayer, in destiny, in harmony, in elemental power.” The Magnolia instructs him: “All the secret powers are ‘Mothers’ . . . Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existence.”

  Here was a radical shift from Margaret’s “Essay on Critics,” in which creative artists are all men. Perhaps the new living situation she had established for herself, independent and “almost happy,” had helped her achieve the Magnolia’s self-sustaining wisdom. “I cannot plunge into myself enough,” she had written to Cary Sturgis in late October as her family scattered and she took possession of Willow Brook. She described then a sense of personal “transformation,” borrowing her metaphor from nature: “The leaf became a stem, a bud, is now in flower.” The nameless rider learns a similar lesson from the Magnolia: that he must “prize the monitions of my nature” and that “sometimes what is not for sale in the market-place” is of the highest value.

  But in Boston in 1841, on the banks of the busy Charles River rather than the serene, idealized Lake Pontchartrain, could men learn from women? Margaret would soon find out. Her Conversations had attracted the interest of the men in her circle, and she’d invited several of them to join the women for a ten-week series meeting on Monday nights, to begin the first week of March. The class filled immediately, netting her six hundred dollars in ticket fees.

  Waldo, to whom she had not at first revealed her authorship of “The Magnolia”—she’d published i
t without an identifying initial—would be among those attending. He’d admired the third issue: “the good Public ought to be humbly thankful,” he’d written to her. As long as Margaret could “hold [her] volatile regiment together,” the future of The Dial was secure, he believed. But he prodded her: “I . . . cannot settle the authorship of the Magnolia.”

  When Margaret admitted the piece was hers, Waldo was unsurprised, admiring its “fervid Southern eloquence” and predicting its “permanent value.” Her fable caused him to wonder, however, as he had so often before, “how you fell into the Massachusetts.” The tale was “rich and sad,” yet “it should not be—if one could only show why not!” Waldo had had more than one opportunity to “show why not”: to ease Margaret’s sadness. His apparently heartless vacillations would ultimately force her departure from “the Massachusetts” and the “large and brilliant circle” she had helped him gather there. Margaret could play both characters in her allegory, female and male. She would flower, and then ride on.

  12

  Communities and Covenants

  WALDO EMERSON WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO RECEIVE AN invitation to Margaret’s evening Conversation series, and she should have taken his response as a sign of trouble to come. He would be glad, he told her, “to hear you talk from the tripod” on classical myth “or any other topic”—Waldo was playing on the now widespread notion of Margaret as sibyl. But he did not “anticipate any reciprocal illumination of my own.” He would come to “the Mythology class” to listen to Margaret, but he could not promise to converse and did not expect enlightenment. That was in December. By late February, with the first meeting less than a week away, he feigned ignorance of the plan. He would bring Lidian along for what “I thought . . . was a party,” he wrote to Cary Sturgis, who had also enrolled. “That it is a class is new.” Then he missed the opening session, claiming to have received notice of the gathering a day too late.