Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  In the end, Lidian may not have joined her husband at George and Sophia Ripley’s house in Bedford Place, where the Conversations were held during the early spring months of 1841, before the Ripleys decamped to Brook Farm in West Roxbury. The renegade minister and his dissident wife had acquired a 170-acre property eight miles from Boston and attracted a small band of like-minded investors to join them in forming a “Community” to promote “a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.” There, labor and profits would be shared equally; art and reform would thrive along with corn and potatoes. Nathaniel Hawthorne had been among the first to sign on, purchasing two shares at five hundred dollars each in hopes of making a home at Brook Farm for himself and his fiancée, Sophia Peabody.

  But equality was not the watchword at Margaret’s Monday-night class. If Lidian Emerson was there, she never spoke. Margaret was hard-pressed to bring together the two contingents she had cultivated for more than a decade. Her friendships with men could be sincere and confiding, particularly in correspondence, but in social settings she easily adapted to their banter and disputation, frequently besting them at it. With the women of her Conversations, however, she had deliberately fostered a “simple earnestness,” a spirit of collaborative inquiry. As one woman later recalled of the group experience, “I was no longer the limitation of myself.” Margaret led the women collectively into “a new world of thought”; she “opened the book of life and helped us to read it for ourselves.” Her male friends were not so willing to follow.

  It had been one thing for Margaret and a few other women to be invited occasionally as guests to meetings of “the club of clubs,” as Waldo once wrote magnanimously to Margaret, urging her to attend an otherwise all-male Transcendental Club meeting in order to “inspire our reptile wits,” but quite another for a man to join an ongoing conversation among women based in “simple earnestness,” especially with other men looking on. Waldo, in whom Margaret had confided her certainty that the women’s minds, “when once awakened,” could not “cease to vibrate,” must have wondered what place, if any, there was for him in such a gathering. There had been “more Greek than Bostonian spoken at the meetings,” Margaret assured him of her first series, “& we may have pure honey of Hymettus”—the Athenian mountain noted for its thyme-covered foothills—“to give you yet.” But was this a “Greek” that men could speak and understand? Or was it the Magnolia’s “secret, radiant, profound . . . feminine” language: “of another order” and incommunicable to men?

  Like the stranger in Margaret’s fable, Waldo would never find out. From the start, as might have been expected, the men more often took the floor—and held it. Among these were Henry Hedge, Bronson Alcott, and James Freeman Clarke, who had returned to Boston despite being refused George Ripley’s recently vacated pulpit to found his own Church of the Disciples. And, on those Monday nights when he could manage the trip from Concord, Waldo Emerson appeared and quickly forgot his promise to offer no “reciprocal illumination.”

  On March 1, the opening session that Waldo missed, Margaret commenced by advising all in attendance to “denationalize” themselves, to forget their American prejudices and “throw the mind back” to the Greek golden age. The Greeks, she explained, had likely “borrowed” their deities from the Egyptians and the Hindus—who “dwelt in the All, the infinite”—and then “analyzed” and “to some degree humanized” them as personifications of distinct qualities. She conjured up Rhea, the mother of all gods and goddesses, representing “Productive Energy,” like the Egyptian fertility goddess Isis. Then she offered brief sketches of Rhea’s progeny: Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Neptune, Diana, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, all “embodiments of Absolute Ideas”—Will, Wisdom, Thought, Purity, Genius, Beauty.

  Frank Shaw broke in to ask how these personifications had “suggested themselves in that barbarous age.” Unfazed, Margaret responded as she had the year before to Mary Jane Quincy, countering that “the word barbarous” simply did not apply to “the age of Plato,” a time when “the human intellect reached a point as elevated in some respects as any it had ever touched.”

  But Frank Shaw was not so easily convinced. Just retired at age thirty from one of the great Boston mercantile firms, repulsed by the greed and exploitation he’d witnessed in the family business and at slave-trading ports in the West Indies and the American South, Frank Shaw was a prime backer of the Ripleys’ communal experiment at Brook Farm. His objection now was altogether different from Mrs. Quincy’s. He argued that the Hindus must have had the superior belief system: wasn’t the “infinity” of the Hindus “impaired” when the Greeks assigned to their gods “the duties, passions, and criminal indulgences of men”? By “bringing their deities to the human level,” Frank thought, “the Greeks had taken one step down.”

  William White, a young reform-minded journalist, took another tack: What of the “North American Indian’s worship of the Manitou,” a god with “no passion that had degraded humanity”? Wasn’t that “purer than the Greek worship”? Soon Henry Hedge was chiming in with an erudite gloss. “Nobody could show a purely Greek mythos,” he pointed out, whereupon William White insisted that “culture,” no matter how advanced, could not bring about spiritual enlightenment. Christian “revelation” was needed to “complete the work.” The men had brought the conversation back around to church matters.

  Sophia Ripley and Elizabeth Peabody managed an occasional interjection—Sophia to clarify that for the Hindus, “virtue lay in contemplation” rather than good works; Elizabeth to grumble that she’d always considered the Greeks to have taken “a step up.” Elizabeth had studied Greek with her father as a girl and later in a yearlong tutorial with Waldo Emerson shortly after he’d graduated from Harvard; he’d refused to accept any pay, pronouncing her as proficient in the language as he. Still, Elizabeth’s opinion counted for little on this evening. The teenage Caroline Healey, a newcomer among the women, taking notes as rapidly as she could, recorded her own frustration: “I thought a good deal, but did not speak.” Margaret did not silence her own exasperation.

  By Caroline Healey’s account, Margaret attempted to steer the conversation back to the Greeks, remarking that she “was sorry we had wandered from our subject so far as to doubt her very premises!” But digression and dispute on the part of the men continued. “Would not Plato have been greater had he been born into the nineteenth century?” William White speculated. At last Margaret observed drily that she had hoped “the presence of gentlemen” would prevent such “desultory prattling” and “keep us free from prejudice.” She asked the group to choose a subject for the next session and agree to keep to it. “Rhea,” the mother of all gods, and her “Productive Energy,” was voted in, perhaps by the otherwise mostly silent women. Margaret closed, Caroline Healey recorded, “with a gentle reproof to our wandering wits”: “I thought she was rightly disappointed.”

  As a newcomer, Caroline could not have guessed at the extent of that disappointment. By the time she’d closed the latest series of Conversations for women only, Margaret had written to William Channing, the group had “seemed melted into one love.” The women had established a “relation” that was “perfectly true”: “We have time, patience, mutual reverence and fearlessness eno[ugh] to get at one another’s thoughts.” Margaret’s beloved Anna Barker had been “all kindled,” speaking freely from the outset and telling Margaret that “none there could be strangers to her more.” Now most of these women had turned bystanders to the men’s rambling disquisitions. How far short the class fell from her ideal was exemplified by the Greek gods and goddesses themselves: male and female “distinct in expression, but equal in beauty, strength and calmness.”

  A week later, Waldo Emerson was on hand. Caroline Healey was fascinated by the matchup: Waldo and Margaret “met as Pyramus and Thisbe,” she observed, referring to the characters in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “with a blank wall between,” each unable to comp
rehend the other’s views. Caroline had neatly intuited the “perpetual wall” that Margaret had once complained to Cary Sturgis “is always grieving me” when attempting to converse with Waldo face to face. On this evening, Margaret’s introductory speech on the “bounteous giver”—Ceres, Persephone, Isis, Rhea, or Diana, who served as “modifications of one enfolding idea . . . accepted by all nations”—only prompted Waldo to propose Napoleon as a contemporary man of “will” who could “easily have suggested” a pantheon of gods. “Let us pray for scores of such,” echoed Charles Wheeler, a newly appointed instructor of history at Harvard, “that a new and superior mythos may arise for us!”

  “Margaret retorted indignantly,” Caroline Healey wrote, that such a fraternity would more likely leave us “nothing better than . . . memoirs of their hats, coats, and swords,” certainly no valuable “lesson.” Margaret urged the class to “take the beautiful Greek mythi as they were, without troubling ourselves about those which might arise for us!” But, as Caroline wrote of a later session, “there were too many clergymen in the company. Everybody was interested in somebody nearer at hand.” Worse still, for much of the evening Waldo Emerson “pursued his own train of thought. He seemed to forget that we had come together to pursue Margaret’s.”

  Margaret postponed the next week’s meeting, overcome by headache, and Waldo’s attendance at later sessions was spotty. By the final class in May, there were “few present,” Caroline Healey noted, and “we were all dull.” Several had departed for Brook Farm, with Margaret privately expressing doubt that “they will get free from all they deprecate in society.” Caroline herself was set to leave Boston for a teaching position in Baltimore. She concluded that Margaret “never enjoyed this mixed class, and considered it a failure so far as her own power was concerned.” Yet the eighteen-year-old had been inspired to speak on occasion, perhaps after witnessing Margaret’s refusal to conceal her impatience or to give up on her “theme.” Caroline left the last class sorrowing that she might never see Margaret Fuller again—“I love her so much!” —and certain that “in no way was Margaret’s supremacy so evident as in the impulse she gave to the minds of younger women.”

  At the sixth session, Waldo had clashed again with Margaret over the myth of Cupid and Psyche, and Psyche’s “blunder,” as Waldo saw it, in daring to look at her lover, the error that launched her into a life of trial. “It was a duty not to look!” he declared, “to resist the evil, to strive triumphantly”—and “to recognise it—never!” Good, he claimed, “was always present to the soul”; there was no reason not to follow “the good.” But Margaret objected that evil itself was “a good in the grand scheme of things.” Psyche’s violation of the ban was no “blunder.” It brought her new knowledge of the world and set her on a “pilgrimage of [the] soul.” This was the grand theme of all the goddess myths, she asserted: the painful struggle toward self-knowledge and a means of exerting “the Productive Energy” after the loss of innocence, or “what is dear in childhood.” Margaret herself “would not accept the world,” she vowed, if she could not “believe evil [was] working in it for good! Man had gained more than he lost by his fall.”

  “Are we better then, than God?” Cary Sturgis asked. It was the kind of impertinent yet pithy question that she loved to ask and that in recent months had brought her even closer than Margaret to Waldo Emerson.

  For the past eighteen months, Waldo and Margaret had played not Pyramus and Thisbe but Oberon and Titania, Shakespeare’s meddlesome fairy king and queen, in a drama of rapidly shifting “elective affinities” among a cast of young lovers—Anna Barker, Sam Ward, Cary Sturgis, Ellery Channing, and Margaret’s sister, Ellen—with some of its most poignant scenes set in the many-chambered Emerson home or the nearby Concord woods, a territory of both transcendence and treachery. The odd number of players ensured that there would be no symmetry, no satisfactory pairing off for all. And in the end it was Margaret, the one who “bound in the belt of her sympathy & friendship all whom I know & love,” as Waldo would later write, who was left out, bravely attempting to live “more alone and less lonely” when so many around her were bent on establishing communal—or connubial—relations.

  The year of mostly amicable work on The Dial, conducted largely through the mail, had covered over a succession of flare-ups between Margaret and Waldo that erupted again when they were in the same room together during the Conversations, with Waldo now publicly refusing to admit the “good” of suffering or to recognize and respond to Margaret’s, as he had so often failed to do in private. For the pageant of fluctuating affections was as much about Margaret and Waldo’s “connexion”—what could it be?—as about their ability, as polestars, to attract and influence the others in what Margaret called their “constellation.” When “the young people”—in this case, Anna, Sam, and Cary, all members of the “Mythology class”—chided Waldo for his behavior, “wish[ing] to know what possessed me to tease you with so much prose, & becloud the fine conversation,” as Waldo wrote to Margaret in a letter of apology for returning her fair “eastern pearls with chuckstones of granite,” it was as a signal to Waldo that Margaret needed, and deserved, not just the financial support of their ticket fees, but also a cessation of strife after a long season of disappointment.

  Waldo saw it too, if belatedly, and in his letter he asked Margaret’s forgiveness not just for his performance in the “game of wits & fashionists,” but also “for all the years of dereliction” in his duty toward her, signing himself “with joy & hope Your friend.” The letter was proof of the truth, for Waldo at least, of the peculiar opening sentence of the essay “Friendship,” which he had composed during these months of evolving alliances: “We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.” Waldo’s reserve had been an obstacle to intimacy for as long as the two eminences had known each other, yet now, as he attempted to smooth Margaret’s ruffled feathers, he offered only the pale assurance that “our friendship . . . should adjourn its fulness of communion into pure eternity.” As Margaret had grown more certain of the range of her powers, what she called “my need of manifold being,” Waldo’s deficiency—his “most unfriendly friendliness” —became increasingly evident, and the contrast between the two more stark. Margaret knew all about the “masculine obligations of all-sufficingness”; she felt them herself in her role as family provider. But Waldo’s self-sovereignty was extreme, a form of blindness. As Margaret phrased it, “this light will never understand my fire.”

  Yet she strove to be understood. Part of that effort had been introducing to Waldo her younger friends, the talented former pupils and budding “Genii” she had recognized in her circuit, announcing their excellences to the Concord “sage,” only to have him affirm and expand on her initial approbation. This pleased her: the more friends Margaret and Waldo shared, particularly if they had been hers to start with, the more secure she felt in his friendship. On his side, Waldo may have sensed he could indirectly satisfy Margaret—“the much that calls for more,” in her self-description—by tending to her flock. All were more monied and more beautiful than Margaret—or than Waldo had been at their age—and their greater ease in the world, their “gipsy” freedom of movement, tantalized Margaret and Waldo, both of whom “belong[ed] to the bread-winning tribe who serve the clock,” in Margaret’s phrase, despite their disparate natures, fire and light.

  She had begun by sending Waldo one of Cary Sturgis’s “good letters” and suggesting he invite the two of them for a stay in Concord. Waldo swiftly obliged, for “guests so queenly & poetic.” Cary’s unscheduled days permitted a visit before Margaret could break from her teaching, however, and in the end she went on her own. Waldo reported immediately to Margaret that Cary had “surprised me into very pleasant thoughts by her questions.” There had been an instant affinity. “I shall see her hereafter as an old acquaintance,” he wrote in June of 1838.

  And in fact she was. Waldo and Cary Sturgis had crossed paths before at social gatherings in Boston; th
e previous year, he’d noted her in his journal as “the fair girl whom I saw in town expressing so decided & proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so willful & so lofty a will.” Perhaps Waldo knew the story of Cary’s expulsion from the tiresome Dorothea Dix’s Boston school before she found her way to Margaret’s more liberal tutelage. Cary Sturgis “inspires the wish to come nearer & to speak to this nobleness,” Waldo confessed in his journal. Margaret had managed the introduction that Waldo, the married householder sixteen years Cary’s senior, had not been able to press for himself. Now Cary had “engaged my cold pedantic self,” Waldo wrote, “into a fine surprise of thought & hope.”

  Nineteen years old and beyond the reach of her father’s prohibitions, Cary had the self-possession as well to make her way to Waldo Emerson’s house without Margaret as chaperone. She had already chosen Waldo as an “influence.” After hearing his lecture “The Heart” several months earlier, Cary had written to Waldo requesting a manuscript copy to read to her friends. The same age, at this Concord visit, as Waldo’s first wife when she died after less than two years of marriage, Cary was a sturdier, braver version of the enchanting tubercular Ellen Emerson. Like Ellen she wrote poetry, the best of which Waldo called admiringly “her blasphemies.” In Cary’s “lofty” willfulness, Waldo detected a singularly uninhibited will to live as she pleased. One of Cary’s first poems published in The Dial was called “Life” and began with these lines:

  Greatly to Be

  Is enough for me,

  Is enough for thee.

  But Cary was drawn equally, if not more, to Ellery Channing, her age mate and companion from the prosperous shore town of Newburyport, north of Boston, where her family summered. Although Cary’s and Ellery’s poems had much in common—Waldo termed both their verse “the right poetry of hope”—she could hardly have made a more imprudent romantic choice. Ellery’s poetry, which Margaret sent to Cary in manuscript, perhaps as an advisory, was his own best and worst advertisement: “Be not afraid to utter what thou art / ’T is no disgrace to keep an open heart.” The footloose and feckless Ellery was not about to make a commitment to Cary Sturgis, despite her family wealth and kindred “gipsy” spirit. Waldo applauded Ellery as a “good vagabond,” admired his “daredevil originality,” and worried lest “irresistible custom brings him plump down, and he finds himself instead of odes, writing gazettes & leases.” He was another of the young men, like Henry Thoreau, whose rebellions Waldo enjoyed vicariously. More practical and anxious to protect Cary’s feelings, Margaret told Waldo that Ellery, so “full of indirections,” as even Waldo had to admit, reminded her of “a great genius with a little wretched boy—trotting beside him.” When, during the summer of The Dial’s first publication, as Ellery casually presented her with a sheaf of his poems for consideration and then announced his plans to leave for Illinois and take up farming, Margaret wrote to Cary approving the move: “I think he might as well be in one place as another, since he will not avail himself of the most precious friendships.”