Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  Margaret had “taxed” Waldo for his coldness before the summer of broken covenants. In a journal passage of the previous winter, Waldo recorded that Margaret told him she’d rather go to his lectures—“the best of me is there”—than talk with him in Concord. “It is even so,” he admitted to himself. “Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to me.” When “friendship of the noble-minded is offered me, I am made sensible of my disunion with myself. The head is of gold, the feet are of clay.” He could “see the ludicrousness of the plight,” yet he would not put aside “my churl’s mask.” This “privation,” his diffidence at close range even in his own home, he believed, “has certain rich compensations inasmuch as it makes my solitude dearer.” Although he courted friendship, when guests arrived, all too often “in my heart I beseech them to begone & I flee to the secretest hemlock shade in Walden Woods to recover my selfrespect. Patimur quisque Suos Manes!” (We each must bear our own destiny!)

  But Margaret would not give up on him, and instead learned to hold back, knowing that an open expression of emotion “might destroy relations, and I might not be able to be calm and chip marble with you any more,” she teased. If she spoke to Waldo of her need, it was in code. Filling out the final blank pages of the first issue of The Dial, Margaret dropped in several poems of her own and one of Sarah Clarke’s, and a few lines of prose ending, “Wise man, you never knew what it is to love.” Then she wrote Waldo, asking him to “admire the winding up, the concluding sentence!!” He did not respond.

  The expansion of their dyad to include the “young people” gave both Margaret and Waldo hope of more: “of being often & often shined on & rained on by these influences of being steeped in this light & so ripened to power whereof I yet dreamed not,” Waldo rhapsodized, “suddenly uplifted” by the notion, foreign to him since Ellen’s death, that “nobleness is loving, & delights in sharing itself.” He “dared” to entertain “unlimited hopes” of “the four persons who seemed to offer me love at the same time and draw to me & draw me to them.” Of the intimate conclave at Concord, Waldo wrote to Margaret, “I have lived one day.” She had won him to her side.

  But now she was bereft. Anna and Sam had not invited her to their wedding, where Waldo would appear as honored guest. A powerfully emotive single woman might have unsettled the celebrants, whereas a noted former minister—a married man—would seem to pose no threat. A week went by, and finally Margaret wrote Cary to “tell you how I fare,—yet it seems impossible. Rivers of life flow, seas surge between me and you[.] I cannot look back, nor remember how I passed them . . . I have no future, as no past.” The best she could say was “I live, I am.” She would remember her promise, made to Cary at midsummer, to find out Ellery Channing’s address.

  Margaret had received a letter from Waldo, thanking her “for the joy I have drawn & do still draw from these flying days,” and pledging, “I shall never go quite back to my old arctic habits.” He acknowledged his own hurt—“a flash of lightning shivers my castle in the air”—and the far greater “bereavement” that was Margaret’s, “whose heart unceasingly demands all, & is a sea that hates an ebb.” He urged her to “write to me from any mood: I would not lose any ray from this particular house of heaven in which we have lately abode.”

  And there was her mistake. She believed he wanted to hear all. She would write to him now of the “love” that animated her passions for their young friends, but that had at its source her love for Waldo, her desire to win his special regard—“I need to be recognized,” she would tell him. Only one of her many letters to Waldo has survived from the several weeks leading up to and immediately following Anna and Sam’s wedding on October 3, Sam’s twenty-third birthday, also the fifth anniversary of Timothy Fuller’s death. But Margaret saved all of Waldo’s, each one marking a steady decline in his willingness to hear from her in “any mood,” his weakening belief in “love . . . sharing itself,” until finally: “I ought never to have suffered you to lead me into . . . writing on our relation.”

  He wished instead to turn the clock back, to “live as we have always done”: “I was content & happy to meet on a human footing a woman of sense & sentiment with whom one could exchange reasonable words.” A temperate connection was the “foundation of everlasting friendship,” and “the slower & with the more intervals the better.” Why couldn’t theirs be a “relation” like that “of brothers who are intimate & perfect friends without having ever spoken of the fact”? But “ask me what I think of you & me,—& I am put to confusion . . . Do not expect it of me again for a very long time.”

  Along the way Waldo had let Margaret know that it was to Cary “I write my letters lately,” receiving “golden epistles” in return: “I have agreed that we are brother & sister by divine invisible parentage.” Waldo’s only sister, Mary Caroline, had been born the year he was eight, the same year his father died; she lived until age three. Waldo told Margaret that “I have dreamed dreams concerning or with our radiant pair of lovers,” but did not mention that “these extraordinary enlargements of my little heart” included a “new covenant” with Anna and Sam, now also too “my brother, my sister!” In his journal Waldo wrote “gladly” of recent scientific discoveries that seemed to open the possibility that “we have these subterranean, or rather, these supersensuous channels of communication, and that spirits can meet in their pure upper sky without the help of organs.” Supersensuous channels: electric affinities.

  By contrast, in response to Margaret’s assertion, quoted by Waldo from one of her lost letters, that “I am yours & yours shall be,” Waldo objected that “you & I are not inhabitants of one thought of the Divine Mind, but of two thoughts . . . we meet & treat like foreign states, one maritime, one inland, whose trade & laws are essentially unlike.” In another letter, he doubted that he and Margaret could ever “reconcile our wide sights,” that Margaret could “give me a look through your telescope or you one through mine;—an all explaining look.” Finally, bluntly, he stated outright, “Sometimes you appeal to sympathies I have not.” The concluding couplet of “The Visit” went further still:

  If Love his moment overstay,

  Hatred’s swift repulsions play.

  Having been party to the original covenant—present for the “three golden days,” the “one day”—Margaret knew now it wasn’t so much emotion Waldo resisted. He had welcomed the feeling natures of Cary, of Anna, and of Sam. It was her emotions, the unceasing sea of them, that overwhelmed, even repulsed him. Margaret’s pining for “a life more intense,” as she wrote once to a female friend, threatened Waldo’s hard-won equanimity as she sought to make him the partner of her passionate intensity. “O these tedious, tedious attempts to learn the universe by thought alone,” she complained of Waldo. One day she would taunt him: “You are intellect, I am life.”

  Waldo acknowledged Margaret’s sovereignty, but her magnetic personality unsettled him, and he accused her of a will to power that she both conceded and denied. In her one surviving letter to Waldo from this time, which began, defensively, “I have felt the impossibility of meeting far more than you,” she asked Waldo to “misunderstand me less” on this one point: “I do not love power other than every vigorous nature delights to feel itself living.” She would not dispute her need to exert a “deep living force.” But, she admonished Waldo, she did not “violate the sanctity of relations” any more than he had in their association with Anna, Cary, and Sam: “Could I lead the highest Angel captive by a look, that look I would not give, unless prompted by true love. I am no usurper. I ask only mine own inheritance.”

  That inheritance, she believed, was her right to the “highest office of friendship”: that Waldo should offer to her “the clue of the labyrinth of my own being.” That he should remain “faithful through the dark hours to the bright.” Instead, when Margaret wrote to him from her heart, Waldo’s response had been “I know not what this means; perhaps this will trouble me; the time
will come when I shall hide my eyes from this mood.” His incomprehension, his refusals, had taught her, finally, that “you are not the friend I seek.”

  And what did Waldo seek? “Did not you ask for a ‘foe’ in your friend?” she pressed him. “Did not you ask for a ‘large formidable nature’?” Margaret could easily oblige. But “a beautiful foe, I am not yet, to you. Shall I ever be?”

  Forced to accept the limitations of Waldo’s “higher” style of friendship, Margaret now had to reckon with the awareness that, as she wrote to him later, “I value you more than I do myself.” It was almost true, and she would have to change this in herself. For Margaret, unlike all the others, there was “no mortal, who, if I laid down my burden, would take care of it while I slept.” She must learn to be “my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife”—the “destiny” she had once foreseen and now would accept and fulfill.

  In the weeks after their wedding, Anna and Sam welcomed Margaret too into a “new alliance,” hoping to ease her hurt feelings. They spent an evening at Willow Brook, speaking little, but “all three meeting in one joy.” After the couple left, however, Margaret realized she no longer envied their happiness. “Is it that whatever seems complete sinks at once into the finite?” she wondered. Anna’s “strongest expression of pleasure,” which she repeated over and over, Margaret noticed, was “I feel as if I had been married twenty years.” How could an already too familiar marriage compare to Margaret’s hazily imagined possibilities among the celestial five? Anna told Margaret she was her “Priestess,” and “that name made me perfectly happy,” Margaret reported to William Channing. “Long has been my consecration; may I not meet those I hold dear at the altar?” Let happiness again be deferred to a distant eternity.

  What helped most was turning inward, cultivating “the deepest privacy,” Margaret wrote to William Channing: “Where can I hide till I am given to myself?” In her journal she confessed, “I grow more and more what they will call a mystic. Nothing interests me except listening to the secret harmonies of nature.” She composed the story of the Magnolia, who had died and was reborn into a “Woman’s heaven.” She dreamed of establishing an ideal “community” on the banks of the Merrimack River at Curzon’s Mill in Newburyport, where she spent several warm October days with Cary. The “fair company” she numbered, aiming to “lie more at ease” together “in the lap of Nature,” did not include Waldo or Cary—only Anna, Sam, William Channing, and his wife and child.

  Margaret’s thoughts began to turn away from Concord and the “tangled wood-walks” she had taken there alone and with Waldo. “Waldo is . . . only a small and secluded part of Nature,” she wrote to Cary, playing on the title of his first book, “secluded by a doubt, secluded by a sneer.” The “harmonies of nature” Margaret heard were different, wilder and more subversive than the hymns Waldo—“that Puritan at concord”—had sung. To William Channing, well out of the fray in Cincinnati, she fumed, “I wish I were a man, and then there would be one. I weary in this playground of boys, proud and happy in their balls and marbles.” There were “women much less unworthy to love” than the men she knew: “The best are so unripe, the wisest so ignoble, the truest so cold!” Her short vacation on the banks of the Merrimack had provoked not just the fantasy of a community without Waldo, but the desire, she told William, “to sail downward along an unknown stream, seeking not a home, but a ship upon the ocean.”

  As Margaret may have hoped, Waldo was startled by her retreat into what he called “a sort of ecstatic solitude,” her renunciation of “all things . . . myself, you also,” as Margaret wrote to him. “After this”—the failure of the covenant, and of her entreaties to Waldo—“I shall be claimed, rather than claim.”

  Inevitably, Waldo found himself on the outside of Sam and Anna’s marriage too, yearning for Cary, who, cannily, kept him at a distance. “To you I can speak coldly and austerely as well as gently & poetically,” he wrote to Cary, who did not protest the few guises he was prepared to show. “Will you not hear me, will you not so reply?” Sometimes she did, sometimes she did not. “Friendship,” Waldo would conclude in his essay, “like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.”

  And so Margaret and Waldo squared off in the Conversations—that “fine war of the Olympians,” in Elizabeth Peabody’s recollection —quarreled, then called a truce; the pattern would not change. When the Monday evenings came to an end, Margaret made plans to move to Boston in the fall, having decided that even the “purest ideal natures” need “the contact of society . . . to temper them and keep them large and sure.” She looked forward to attending concerts, plays, art exhibitions, the stuff of life for her. She vowed, “I will never do as Waldo does”—flee to the woods. She enrolled Lloyd, who had proved more difficult to reform than she’d expected, as a boarder in the new school at Brook Farm. Margaret sent the family cow as well to the “fledglings of Community,” where Nathaniel Hawthorne quickly dubbed the animal the “transcendental heifer,” a creature inclined, like her “mistress,” to be “fractious,” kicking over the bucket at milkings, he wrote to his fiancée, Sophia Peabody.

  Waldo, meanwhile, invited Cary for an early-June stay in Concord, timed for Lidian’s departure on vacation with the children to her hometown in Plymouth. The quicksilver Cary moved him at his depths; as his elected “sister,” she required less of him than Margaret did. If Margaret was to be his friend, it was as a brother—yet how could that be?

  It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary was now. Margaret felt this too; it was why she thought she would make a better man than he. And why she rarely looked at men “with common womanly eyes,” as she once wrote to George Davis, but rather with an eye to friendship—yet on her own more womanly terms. If Waldo wished she would befriend him as a brother, she willed him to befriend her as a sister. The disjunction perplexed and saddened them both.

  Not surprisingly, it was in a poem on the subject of friendship between two men, his literary idol the French essayist Montaigne and his friend Étienne de la Boéce, that Waldo inadvertently wrote the history of his complicated “relation” with Margaret:

  I serve you not, if you I follow,

  Shadowlike, o’er hill and hollow;

  And bend my fancy to your leading,

  All too nimble for my treading.

  When the pilgrimage is done,

  And we’ve the landscape overrun,

  I am bitter, vacant, thwarted,

  And your heart is unsupported.

  “Now all seems fermenting to a new state,” Margaret had boasted to Cary Sturgis of her Conversations for women early in 1840. The same could be said of numerous schemes for reform or innovation that gained momentum in Boston during the century’s fourth decade. The city of nearly 100,000 residents had been quick to recover from the 1837 financial panic and had suffered less than other mercantile centers on the eastern seaboard, its conservative banking industry reaping a rare reward in comparison to financial institutions in New York and Philadelphia, and securing Boston’s place for the moment as the leading port of its size in the Union. The new prosperity seemed only to abet visionary plans born of the darker days when Waldo had asked in his journal, shortly after delivering his incendiary Divinity School Address, “Is it not better to live in Revolution than to live in dead times?” Boston in the 1840s was, in Margaret’s view, a locus of “dissonance, of transition, of aspiration” where “no three persons think alike.”

  The fall of 1840 brought dreamers of all stripes together at Boston’s Chardon Street Chapel, a plain-timbered steeple-less house of worship newly built by Millerite Adventists at the foot of Beacon Hill, for a November meeting of the Friends of Universal Reform. The abolit
ionists William Lloyd Garrison and Maria Chapman were there, along with liberal religion’s gray eminence Reverend Channing, the young firebrand Theodore Parker, Waldo, and Margaret. Chagrined when a turbulent discussion snagged once again on a question of church reform—how best to observe the Sabbath?—Margaret declared the meeting “a total failure” in a letter to William Channing, who’d resigned his pulpit in Cincinnati and was contemplating a move to Brook Farm or possibly to an “association” of his own design in western Massachusetts. “I will not write to you of these Conventions and Communities unless they bear better fruit,” she promised him; “we are not ripe to reconstruct society yet.” Still, like William and others at the convention, Margaret believed that “one thing seems sure”: “many persons will soon, somehow, somewhere, throw off a part, at least, of these terrible weights of the social contract.”

  Just what Margaret’s role in the rebellion would be, if any, remained unclear. She was as capable as any of the communitarians at arguing the difference between “Living and ‘getting a living.’” To William she confessed that if she had “a firmer hold on life”—that is, had the money to invest in a share of a communal property—she might be inclined to sign on. But when George and Sarah Ripley traveled to Concord in a campaign to enroll Waldo in their experiment at Brook Farm, inviting Margaret and Bronson Alcott along for a hearing, Margaret held back. “The Phalanx talk was useless,” she reported afterward to Cary, except in helping her make up her mind to abstain.

  Margaret published two long essays endorsing the Brook Farmers’ aims in successive issues of The Dial, written by Elizabeth Peabody, who shared Margaret’s preference for city life over rural confraternity, yet had opened her bookroom at West Street for the planning sessions of the Ripleys and their friends—men and women “who have dared to say to one another . . . Why not begin to move the mountain of custom and convention?” Margaret sent Lloyd to school at Brook Farm and recommended the community to William Channing and to her Rhode Island friend Charles Newcomb, who boarded there for several months. She visited often enough to have a room in the communal “Hive” designated as her own. But given what she’d learned of the “limitations of human nature” from one particular group of individuals, Margaret had come to believe that “Utopia is impossible to build up” on earth. She never joined the cause.