Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  She knew that “deep yearnings of the heart” such as those she had experienced in years past at Concord would be “felt again, & then I shall long for some dear hand to hold.” But she embraced “the blessings of my comparative freedom. I stand in no false relations.” Concord was not just a nursery, but a village made up of those “who only seem husbands wives, & friends.” Margaret’s own “curse”—to be “much alone”—was “nothing compared with that of those who have entered into those relations, but not made them real.”

  A young friend she’d met the year before at Brook Farm, Georgiana Bruce, urged Margaret to write an expansive novel on womanhood—a bildungsroman like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Georgiana’s own “adventurous course” in life had come to fascinate Margaret. Tired of the intrigues of sylvan fellowship at the West Roxbury community, Georgiana had taken a job as assistant to the reform-minded Quaker Eliza Farnham, newly installed as matron of the women’s prison at Sing Sing on the Hudson River, thirty miles upstream from New York City. Margaret told Georgiana she would not write the Apprenticeship; she doubted her capabilities as a writer of fiction. But she had accepted a suggestion from Horace Greeley that she expand “The Great Lawsuit” into a book—or “pamphlet,” as she persisted in referring to the volume through most of her work on the project—which Greeley, who admired the essay’s “remarkable justness” and “brilliancy,” promised to shepherd into print. When Georgiana Bruce sent Margaret some of the journals that the female inmates at Sing Sing had written under Eliza Farnham’s program of rehabilitation, Margaret felt certain these women’s stories had a place in her new book.

  William Channing, a founding member of the New York Prison Association and an occasional visiting preacher to the men at Sing Sing, encouraged Margaret’s new interest in female “moral reform”—most of the women prisoners were prostitutes. But Margaret insisted their “degradation” had less to do with personal moral failings than with the plight of women in general. The prisoners’ diaries, she believed, “express[ed] most powerfully the present wants of the sex at large.” As for the incarcerated women, “What blasphemes in them must fret and murmur in the perfumed boudoir.” There was no separating one woman’s disgrace—or deliverance—from another’s, “for a society beats with one great heart.” Margaret decided to take lodgings for the fall in the small town of Fishkill Landing, thirty miles upriver from Sing Sing, to make her own mercy call at the prison—she wished to meet these women as she had the Chippewa and Ottawa Indians at Mackinac—and to complete her “pamphlet.” She would bring along Cary Sturgis, with whom she knew she could live “so pleasantly together and apart.” Cary was writing and illustrating her own book, a collection of children’s tales.

  After this departure, Margaret would scarcely ever return to New England. She had decided to accept another of Horace Greeley’s offers, this one to become literary editor of the New-York Tribune. Greeley had closed his literary magazine, The New-Yorker, to found the Tribune shortly after The Dial came into existence, and his daily paper had achieved a success well beyond that of the Transcendentalists’ high-minded quarterly he so admired, with more than thirty thousand subscribers in the city and many more readers of its weekly edition throughout the northern states and the western territories where Margaret had traveled. For Margaret, accepting the assignment meant moving to the city in order to write regular columns—not just book reviews—on all the arts. Greeley considered Margaret “already eminent in the higher walks of Literature” and believed her contributions would “render this paper inferior to no other in the extent and character of its Literary matter,” as he wrote when he announced she would take over the editorship in December 1844. Not only would Margaret’s reviews and reportage bring distinction to the Tribune, but the attention she gave to the city’s burgeoning performing arts would help make New York America’s first city, as it was fast becoming, leaving Boston, with its inward-looking philosophers and single-minded reformers, far behind. Margaret always retained her New England–bred, spiritually based intellectualism, her belief that “the wiser mind rejoices that it can no way be excused from constant thought, from an ever springing life.” But it was time to “at least try” to make her way in “the busy rushing world” of New York City.

  For seven weeks in October and November of 1844, Margaret wrote and revised at Fishkill Landing, the manuscript “spinning out beneath my hand.” Once again she produced an amalgam, introducing into her original critique of “personal relations” (inspired to a large extent by Conversations at West Street and conversations with Waldo) her new ideas on the women of Sing Sing, an extended catalogue of influential women in the past and present, further thoughts on woman’s essential nature and the possibilities and impossibilities of marriage, and a culminating argument that women should take up the anti-slavery cause. “When it comes to casting my thought into form,” Margaret reflected now, “no old one suits me.” She preferred instead to “invent one,” which allowed “the pleasure of creation” to spur her on. When she had completed her “pamphlet”—Woman in the Nineteenth Century would be its title at publication in February 1845—she felt “a delightful glow as if I had put a good deal of my true life in it.” So closely identified was she with the work that, she wrote to William Channing, she expected to continue to revise it with future editions—“to be able to make it constantly better,” the same wish Margaret had always had for herself.

  • V •

  NEW YORK

  City Hall Park, near the offices of the New-York Tribune

  14

  “I stand in the sunny noon of life”

  MARGARET, WHO HAD ALWAYS ADMIRED THE MARRIAGE OF her friends Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and covertly acknowledged their “holy and equal” union in “The Great Lawsuit” as a model partnership of two creative minds, would have been surprised to hear Sophia’s private condemnation of the treatise that became Woman in the Nineteenth Century. “What do you think of the speech which Queen Margaret has made from the throne?” Sophia wrote to her mother after reading the original Dial essay. “It seems to me that if she were married truly, she would no longer be puzzled about the rights of woman.” In the newlywed Sophia’s view, Margaret had no right to comment on the sacred “relation.” Marriage, for Sophia, was a “revelation of woman’s true destiny and place,” which could not be “imagined” by anyone who had never experienced it.

  When the book appeared, Sophia’s opinion did not change. “A wife only” can understand the dynamics of marriage, she complained again to her mother, and, in expanding her subject to take in the plight of prostitutes, Margaret had given voice to thoughts that “should not be spoken.” Other critics echoed in print Sophia’s private reservations. “No unmarried woman has any right to say any thing on the subject” would be a recurrent theme with reviewers who dismissed the book—which, nevertheless, swiftly found an audience, as booksellers snatched up the first printing of fifteen hundred copies within a week to meet customer demand.

  But Margaret’s “disinterested” vantage point was precisely what enabled her to render so discerning a critique in a book that reviewers, whether favorably inclined or not, agreed was the first significant work to take “the liberal side in the question of ‘Woman’s Rights’ since the days of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Margaret wasn’t married; she had no personal stake in defending the institution and plenty of experience in discovering that “woman’s true destiny and place” could be found elsewhere. She was free to observe and free to say what she had witnessed—if she dared.

  Other married friends, such as the writer Lydia Maria Child, whose difficult marriage may have made her especially sympathetic, found Woman in the Nineteenth Century to be “a bold book.” Child had readily braved public outrage over her abolitionist writings, but she confessed to a friend that she would “not have dared to have written some things” in Margaret’s book, “though it would have been safer for me, being married.” Still, “they need to have b
een said,” and Margaret was “brave” to have done it. Margaret was “a woman of more powerful intellect, comprehensive thought, and thorough education than any other American authoress,” Child wrote in the Broadway Journal, and it took more courage and intelligence to speak up for women, one-half the people, than for enslaved blacks. And it took even more courage to connect the two forms of servitude and place them within a far-reaching system of oppression that cheated everyone of their humanity, as Margaret had done with this book. “There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves,” Margaret had written. “While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.”

  Although Margaret’s additions to the original essay almost tripled its length, its core arguments remained those laid out in “The Great Lawsuit,” whose subtitle, “Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” alerted readers to the comprehensive nature of her inquiry. Man and woman, she asserted, were two halves of “the same thought.” Neither “idea” could be fully realized as long as man failed to see that woman’s “interests were identical with his; and that, by the law of their common being, he could never reach his true proportions while she remained in any wise shorn of hers.” Conventional modes of behavior and patterns of development—the separate “spheres,” private and public, in which women and men were expected to conduct their lives—prevented individual women and men from attaining their “true proportions.” A house is “no home” for a woman “unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.” Every human being, woman as well as man, must be allowed “as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely.”

  Posing man’s and woman’s fates as linked, and emphasizing that neither man nor woman could “live without expansion” as individuals, had earned Margaret partisans among the male Transcendentalists. Henry Thoreau praised “The Great Lawsuit” as “a noble piece, rich extempore writing, talking with pen in hand.” Waldo Emerson counted the essay “quite an important fact in the history of Woman: good for its wit, excellent for its character.” But the events of the past year—the births in discordant Concord, the visit to Sing Sing, the favorable reception of her book on the West, with its explicit condemnation of the white man’s abuse of the Indian, and perhaps most of all the “independent life” she maintained for several productive weeks spent “so pleasantly together and apart” with Cary Sturgis—pushed her both to strengthen her indictment of male culpability in female suppression and to adopt an impassioned rhetoric of uplift directed to women readers. “The world, at large, is readier to let Woman learn and manifest the capacities of her nature,” Margaret declared, as if she could will her own recent soul-expanding experiences to extend to all women. She would not hear from Waldo Emerson about her new book.

  Working at her desk in Fishkill Landing, Margaret had surrounded herself with volumes of Spinoza, Confucius, and Plato, spread open for reference—and she made use of them. But the extraordinary power and enduring appeal of Woman in the Nineteenth Century lay in Margaret’s prescient readings of women’s lives, related in anecdote and biographical summary with the same expansive sympathy she had applied as a critic to texts by her favorite writers. Many women—if not Sophia Hawthorne—found their own simmering frustrations acknowledged, and their secret hopes affirmed, in the book. For, extraordinary as she was, Margaret had plenty of “sisters,” as she now addressed her readers, who had experienced similar cruel slights and crushing disappointments and could thrill to Margaret’s recitals of them, as well as to her promise of a better day to come, if only women would “rouse their latent powers” and “assume [their] inheritance.”

  Margaret pointed to the beginnings of woman’s suppression in childhood, when, “instead of calling out, like a good brother, ‘you can do it, if you only think so,’” boys instead taunted their sisters: “‘Girls can’t do that; girls can’t play ball.’” When girls showed themselves the equals of boys in schoolwork, their accomplishments were robbed from them by being labeled “masculine.” “Let it not be said,” Margaret admonished, “wherever there is energy or creative genius, ‘She has a masculine mind.’” And too few girls had the opportunity to face intellectual challenges and succeed at them. “If she knows too much, she will never find a husband” was a sad and self-perpetuating prejudice maintained by all too many parents. The corresponding practice of limiting the education of girls to subjects that would make them “better companions and mothers for men” was a pernicious one: “a being of infinite scope must not be treated with an exclusive view to any one relation.” Instead, “give the soul free course” and “the being will be fit for any and every relation to which it may be called.”

  And what of that “relation”—marriage? Margaret lamented the fact that woman “must marry, if it be only to find a protector, and a home of her own.” The security marriage offered was illusory, for in truth a woman had fewer rights when married than when single: she gave up all her property to her husband, forfeited her right to appear in court or to raise her children in the event of divorce, and became a possession or, at best, “an adopted child” in her husband’s household. The marriage contract was a “seal of degradation” under these circumstances: the woman “belong[s] to the man, instead of forming a whole with him.” Margaret invoked the eighteenth-century mystic and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg’s vision of a heaven in which “there is no marrying nor giving in marriage, each is a purified intelligence, an enfranchised soul,—no less!” and she applauded his imagined paradise as an entirely natural response to the legal and spiritual bondage of conventional marriage.

  Yet Margaret held out hope for the reform of earthly marriages. She identified four types, each of which enabled wife and husband to function as equal partners, and evaluated them according to the degree of nourishment they provided for the “enfranchised soul.” First was the “household partnership,” based in “mutual esteem,” in which the husband serves as provider, the wife as housekeeper. While such marriages were marred by a “mutual dependence” and an adherence to the separation of spheres, each partner respects the other’s contribution, grateful that “life goes more smoothly and cheerfully.” The second type represented a “closer tie,” but a more dangerous dependence: this was marriage based on “mutual idolatry,” in which “the parties weaken and narrow one another,” living as if “in a cell together,” believing that they alone are “wise.”

  The inverse of “mutual idolatry” was a third, far more positive type: the outward-looking “intellectual companionship” of partners who “work together for a common purpose.” Such marriages were most often made by men “in public life”—artists, writers, politicians—whose wives become their “companions and confidants.” And increasingly, as “the intellectual development of Woman has spread wider and risen higher,” both husband and wife have “shared the same employment.” Provocatively, Margaret cited as a prime example the extramarital union of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin: two writers who married only when Wollstonecraft became pregnant, “two minds . . . wed by the only contract that can permanently avail, that of a common faith and a common purpose.” Such unions, Margaret wrote, “express an onward tendency”: “They speak of aspiration of soul, of energy of mind, seeking clearness and freedom.” Margaret also endorsed the French novelist George Sand’s extramarital liaisons as Sand’s only means of “seeking clearness and freedom” in a love “relation” available to Sand after an unhappy early marriage arranged by her parents. Margaret deplored arranged marriages, or any marriage made for the sake of shoring up the parties’ finances, and she looked forward to the day when “such beings as these”—Wollstonecraft and Sand—“rich in genius, of most tender sympathies, capable of high virtue,” would not “find themselves . . . in a place so narrow, that, in breaking bonds, they become outlaws.”

  And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,�
�� but added to these a “religious” dimension, “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” Margaret was careful to specify that by “religion” she meant “the thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma.” She also had in mind a particular style of devotion: a “reverent love,” a sense that one’s partner is the “only true” companion, the only other one “of all human beings” who can “understand and interpret . . . my inner and outer being.” There was an echo here of the bond Margaret had hoped to form with Waldo Emerson, her “need to be recognized” by him, to receive from him the “highest office of friendship”: “the clue of the labyrinth of my own being.” And of the far from “ordinary attachment” she had felt for Sam Ward, her belief that “age, position, and pursuits being so different, nothing but love bound us together.” Margaret had sought this highest relation from all the men she loved so far, inaccessible as they were or had made themselves to her. A “mutual visionary life,” she had termed it the summer before when pondering in her journal the diverse attributes of the men she knew—the “deep polished intellect” of one, the “pure & passionate beauty” of another. That day she had allowed herself to imagine the perfect masculine amalgam: “I seem to want them all.”

  Not surprisingly, the marriages Margaret cited as examples of this fourth type were also unconventional ones: the Count and Countess Zinzendorf, Saxon royalty of the previous century who gave their fortune to support a religious community founded on principles of equality, only to endure long periods of separation as a result of religious persecution. And even more shocking than her approving passages on Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand was Margaret’s account of “The Flying Pigeon”—one of seven wives of an American Indian chief, but “his only true wife,” who “inspired a veneration” because of her active generosity and the “quick decision and vivacity of her mind.”